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God and reality 











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GOD AND REALITY 


THE BisHop Pappock LECTURES FOR 1925-26 





THE PADDOCK LECTURES 


ADVENTURE FOR GOD 
By the Rt. Rey. Charles H. Brent, D.D., LL.D., Bishop 
of Western New York. Crown 8vo. 
HIGH PRIESTHOOD AND SACRIFICE 


An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews 


By William Porcher DuBose, M.A, S.T.D. 
Crown 8vo. 


THE USE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE IN 
THE PUBLIC WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH 
By the Right Rev. A. C. A. Hall, D.D., LL.D., Bishop 
of Vermont. Crown 8vo. 
PERSONAL IDEALISM AND MYSTICISM 
By William Ralph Inge, W.R., C.V.O., D.D., F.B.A., 
Dean of St. Paul’s. Crown 8vo. 
AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM 


By A. E. J. Rawlinson, B.D., Student and Tutor of 
Christ Church, Oxford; Examining Chaplain to 
the Bishop of Lichfield. Crown 8vo. 

THE FAITH OF THE CROSS 


By the Rt. Rey. Philip Mercer Rhinelander, D.D., 


sometime Bishop of Pennsylvania. Crown 8vo. 
THE AUTHORITY OF RELIGIOUS 
EXPERIENCE 


By the Rt. Rev. Charles Lewis Slattery, D.D., Bishop 
Coadjutor of Massachusetts. Crown 8vo. 





GOD AND REALITY 


THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES —~ ————_ 
FOR 1925-26 Peon Mana 3 
BYiWig 
“STEWART, D.D. 


MARSHALL BOWYER 


PROFESSOR OF DOGMATIC AND MORAL THEOLOGY 
AT NASHOTAH HOUSE 


LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 


55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
TORONTO, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 


1926 








-Copyaicat, 1926, BY | 
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 





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MADE IN THR UNITED STATES 


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THE REVEREND JAMES W. CLARK 


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PREFACE 


—— 


IT was a somewhat bewildering privilege to de- 
liver these lectures before the Seminary which 
gave me my first lessons in theology—in fact, be- 
fore some of the same professors who taught me 
then. All the more thankful I am, then, for the 
great kindness of Dean Fosbroke and the whole 
Faculty and student-body, kindness which gave me 
the most valuable moral support. I am especially 
grateful to Professor F. J. Hall, who added to the 
immense debt I already owed him by giving gener- 
ously of his time in reading the manuscript and 
materially helping me with many suggestions. 
Great assistance in the earlier stages of my work 
was given by my colleagues at Nashotah House, 
especially Professor H. C. Ackerman, whom I 
have to thank for many illuminating discussions. 
And my students at Nashotah House will never 
know how much I owe to them for the kind of 
help that only sympathetically critical students 
could have rendered. 

No new idea of God, or of anything whatso- 


vil 


vill PREFACE 


ever, is attempted in these lectures. I have rather 
tried to suggest how some age-long tendencies of 
religious thought naturally sort themselves out 
when brought together; and the one thing I would 
plead for most of all is that each man ask himself 
what he means when he thinks of God, without 
flinching from the thought of God, not the stand- 
ardized thought alone, but his own thought as it 
lives and grows. Thinking about God is one of 
the dangerous things in that dangerous occupation, 
priesthood, which we should face as humbly and 
as bravely as we can. 


MARSHALL BOWYER STEWART. 
February, 1926, 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


. IDEAS OF GoD IN PRESENT CIRCULA- 


TOMA MUM iulina aye us une een nat ta ght 


. DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF GoD 27 


. GoD A PROXIMATE REALITY . KOO 
. GOD THE SUPREME VALUE . iLO 
MOD THE ULTIMATE: REALITY 2 TAG 


. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF Gop 187 





GOD AND REALITY 





THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES 
1925-1926 





GOD AND REALITY 


CHAPTER I 


IDEAS OF GOD IN PRESENT 
CIRCULATION 


OvR reason is something like a flash-light which 
we turn about here and there in the dark, throw- 
ing a little circle of light for a moment in this 
direction and that, sweeping over the great dark 
environment, bringing undefined bits of it into 
visibility but not holding still for long, blending 
One image into another, letting what was lighted 
up slip back into the darkness, perhaps again get- 
ting it back into the light, all in pursuit of some 
interests and purposes, themselves often as fickle 
as the light. And our conscious ideas correspond 
to the bits of scenery within the vague little circle 
of light at different moments. ‘They have no clear 
circumference and no fixed centre. We cannot 
think the same thing twice, though we may call it 

3 


4 GOD AND REALITY 


essentially the same. No two of us can think 
exactly the same thing, though we may talk loosely 
as if we did, and find it practicable to act with our- 
selves and others as if we did. But the scenery 
itself is there all the while. 

No idea of ours is more common, and none ts 
more variable, than the sublime idea or class of 
ideas which we symbolize with the word “God.” 
And never has this idea been of so confused and 
variable content among us as it is at present. 

Treatises on the doctrine of God in the tradi- 
tional Christian manner have a relative unity of 
thought and point of view. But even these bring 
together, as attributes of the divine Nature, a 
strange conglomeration of ideas, Hebrew and 
Greek, naive and sophisticated, physical and im- 
material, pictorial and logical, apocalyptic and 
philosophic, passionate and aloof, close to every- 
day life and immeasurably transcendent. There 
are the “quiescent attributes,” as infinity, aseity, 
immensity, eternity, simplicity, unity, spirituality; 
‘active attributes,’ as omnipotence, omniscience, 
omnipresence, will, wisdom; and “moral attri- 
butes,”” as justice, righteousness, goodness, mercy, 
love, blessedness. It does not seem that an idea 
of God which contains all these features can be an 
idea at all, but at best a collection of ideas. 

Outside the formal treatises, if one asks a group 


IDEAS OF GOD 5 


of people what is each one’s favorite idea of God, 
what comes into each one’s mind as the primary 
meaning of God, even among Christians the an- 
swers will offer a wide assortment. There is the 
picture of a very venerable old man, vague and 
large, aloft somewhere, which remains over from 
the childhood imaginings of many, perhaps most, 
people. Some think of God primarily as the good 
Father, who looks out for us, knows what is best 
for us, consoles us in affliction, directs us, and for- 
gives or punishes us. ‘To others he is chiefly the 
Maker of the world and Controller of its extraor- 
dinary events, or perhaps about the same as 
Fate. Others will answer that God seems to them 
chiefly a friendly influence hovering over them, a 
Spirit of Love. Or God is the Lawgiver above, 
or the Voice of conscience within. Or he is a 
man’s alter ego, an invisible Companion, whom 
he may consult in frank discussion of his problems, 
invisible but almost literally audible. 

Then in these days thoughtful people argue for 
one or another leading notion of Deity. A clergy- 
man writes that what is chiefly needed is the ‘‘de- 
personalization” of the idea of God. It is fre- 
quently taken as proved that psychologically speak- 
ing the idea of God is the projection of one’s 
idea of oneself idealized, which is treated as ob- 
jective. There is an ever-present tendency to take 


6 GOD AND REALITY 


the whole universe, or nature, as God, and to say 
that it does not matter whether you employ the 
masculine God, the feminine Nature, or the neuter 
All. The Absolute, the all-inclusive reconciler of 
all the contrarieties of experience, is by no means 
dead: and God is sometimes identified with the 
Absolute. Every now and then someone pro- 
claims that the idea of God as Substance is too 
‘static,’ and must be made “dynamic,” put in 
terms of energy, life-force, purposive will. Or it 
is too monarchical, or too individualistic, and must 
be democratized by rendering God into terms of 
personified social spirit. Or it is too aloof and 
remote from life, and must be made a matter of 
direct experience. Or it is too abstract in its in- 
finity and must be made finite and concrete. Or 
it is too ontological, and must be translated into 
terms of value, especially moral value. Or it is 
too transcendent, and must be made immanent. 
“God,” in the casual oath of the smoking-car, in 
the dazed appeal of one smitten with disaster, in 
the conventional piety of the church-goer and the 
preacher, in the aspiring universe-view of the phi- 
losopher, is a term that may have almost any 
meaning. 

Besides the bewildering discord of many voices 
proclaiming many gods, there is noticeable also a 
disconcerting facility in changing the content of 


IDEAS OF GOD - 


the idea of the Divine, in response to modern con- 
ditions. There comes a shift in economic point of 
view, a revaluation of social relations, a variation 
of physical, biological, or psychological science, 
and we are glibly told that the whole idea of God 
must be shifted, turned upside down, given a new 
centre of gravity, as if God were the easiest thing 
in the world to move about. If there is difficulty 
in making effective use of one kind of God in deal- 
ing with sufferers, or laborers, or soldiers, we are 
advised to try another. ‘This is not meant to be 
wholly a matter of complaint, for it is a natural 
reaction from stupid conventionality; and if the 
whole concept is liquefied or almost evaporated, 
that is natural and has its wholesome aspects as a 
sign of mental and religious vitality. But it means 
also a loss of that stability which is an essential 
feature of religious belief; and an exasperating 
effect of it is that everybody is talking about God 
without anybody’s knowing what anybody else is 
talking about. 

Now no sane person could suppose that all 
these meanings of God can be fused into one; but 
at least they can be classified, according to a few 
dominant ideas which persist substantially through 
all sorts of incidental variations. It is our object 
now to attempt something of this kind. Without 
minimizing all differences, we shall try to see what 


8 GOD AND REALITY 


are the main, the most cardinal, differences. If 
this can be done, we shall be in a better position 
to know, if ever we move over to a new theological 
position, whether we are only going next door or 
crossing an international frontier. 


I 
All kinds and shades of belief about God agree 


upon one thing, that God means some sort of 
superiority. God is whatever he is in a relatively 
high degree, superior if not supreme. There is 
great difference in regard to the degree, as be- 
tween superiorists and supremists. And there 1s 
at any rate one deep cleavage in regard to the 
kind of superiority of God: he is superior power, 
or superior goodness, or both. 

1. God is superior Power. We might at first 
glance think that this is a universal character in 
the idea of God, but some of the conceptions of 
the Divine practically lack this note altogether. 
If God is only the projected ideal of oneself, he 
is not power, though the mind so objectifying its 
ideal self may, and generally does unless it be- 
comes very sophisticated, think there is power in 
this God. Such power as there is is one’s own 
power, released through the contemplation of 
this image of oneself-as-one-would-like-to-be, the 
power of autosuggestion, the power of “‘powerful” 


IDEAS OF GOD 9 


fiction. Again, there is hardly the note of power 
in pure friendly influence, or love. If anyone cares 
at all about such an analysis as this, there may be 
protest on behalf of the power of love. “Love is 
stronger than death.” We have read essays and 
heard sermons the burden of which was that the 
omnipotence of God must be identified with the 
power of love; but these have been uniformly di- 
rected against the thought of God’s “‘manipulating 
the forces of nature,” that is to say, against God 
as power in the direct and obvious sense. ‘he 
‘power’ of love is an analogy. It leaves the 
beloved one free to use or not use his own powers. 
It offers an object which as it comes into the con- 
sciousness of the beloved may be a desirable object, 
and may thus stimulate action by him with his own 
powers. It does not push or pull: it suggests. A 
similar power-idea is in God as the Social Spirit, 
Conscience, and the Moral Governor. God as the 
Sum of all Values is contrasted with the Origin of 
all Forces. The Idea of the Good, as taught by 
Plato, has power on account of the prime reality of 
ideas as such, not of God as such. With all these 
types of belief before us, in which power is at least 
relegated to the background of the idea of God, 
we cannot claim power as a universal element in 
that idea. 

Power is a larger ingredient in most primitive 


10 GOD AND REALITY 


conceptions of a God. If religion developed out 
of belief in mana, an occult impersonal power 
residing in some things, the power of God 1s a very 
primitive idea indeed. If God is anthropo- 
morphic, he excels men in power. The finite God 
of modern times has superior power, though not 
all power; and the same is true of the Life-force, 
and the purposive Will. 

Omnipotence, in its deeper meaning, that all the 
power there is (including sheer physical force) is 
from God, is a leading characteristic of Deity con- 
ceived as Creator, as the whole of Nature, as Sub- 
stance (Spinoza), the Absolute, the Ultimate Re- 
ality, the Ground of Existence. These last ideas 
go deeper than power, indeed, and include it as an 
element of primal Reality, the Source of all things. 

2. God is superior Goodness. Certainly good- 
ness is not a necessary part of the idea of God as 
Nature, the Life-force, the Absolute, the Ultimate 
Reality. There is some of it probably in the way 
most people think of purposive Will. There is 
more goodness in the projected Self, the Social 
Spirit, the Father, Love, the Friendly influence. 
Those who sacrifice omnipotence generally do so 
in the interests of goodness: they would rather 
have a finite good than an infinite neutral. God 
is the Ideal of perfect Goodness in the value- 
theology generally. 


IDEAS OF GOD II 


3. God is a combination or equation of superior 
Power and Goodness. Nearly all use of the term 
“God” to designate a superior Power connotes 
some goodness in such a being; and nearly all use 
of the term ‘‘God”’ to designate a superior Good- 
ness connotes some power in such a being. There 
is much difference in the proportions, as different 
minds view the matter. To some, again, Power or 
Reality is the noun, and goodness is attributed to 
it as an adjective; to others, the Good or the Ideal 
is the noun, and power or reality is attributed to it 
as an adjective. “God” is an honorific name, a 
eulogistic title. “he great difference between athe- 
ism and pantheism les, I think, not in acknowl- 
edging different realities as real, but in acknowl- 
edging or not acknowledging the same reality as 
good: pantheism accepts the same real universe as 
atheism accepts; but pantheism praises it by calling 
it God. Materialism does not praise it—does not 
call matter good, and therefore does not call it 
God. On the other hand, anything that is “‘just an 
ideal,” not real, not endued with power, is not as 
a rule called God. So, generally speaking, and 
especially in full-fledged theism, to call any being 
God is to attribute to such a being both power and 
goodness, both reality and value. 


12 GOD AND REALITY 


II 


The thing in mind first and foremost, when we 
think of God, is (if we are on the right track so 
far) either power or goodness. One of these is 
the core of the concept. Power is not the final 
term, even on its own side of the alternative, but 
it is an early term and easily grasped. Reflection 
leads most of us behind power to an original real- 
ity on which power rests, a “this” which has power. 
And likewise on the other side of the alternative, 
goodness is rather an easy and obvious idea than a 
final one: reflection leads through it to a more 
general and fundamental term, value. And on this 
basis, in every proposition about God the main 
noun, the “base of the subject,’’ as we used to say 
in grammar, is either Reality (at least a reality) 
or Value (at least a value). 

Whichever the subject is, where do we get a 
predicate? How do we find “attributes” for God, 
qualities of God, whatever may be our primary 
noun-idea of God? ‘The traditional theology has 
a double method, deductive and inductive. De- 
ductively, it analyses the primary idea, to see what 
is involved in it. Thus if Ultimate Reality is the 
primary idea, we have infinity, aseity or self- 
existence, eternity, etc. If consummate Value is 
the primary idea, we have benevolence, beauty, 


IDEAS OF GOD 13 


righteousness, etc. It is true that the analysis is 
never quite pure, never a pure logical deduction 
from the general idea: anyone can see that the 
attributes just named, for instance, are more or 
less tinged with the colors of our experience; but 
on the whole they may be said to be involved in the 
primary ideas, and derived by analysis from them. 
The validity of this analysis depends on its ob- 
servance of the laws of logic. 

Inductively, attributes of the Divine are ascer- 
tained from our own experience. If God is the 
supreme Reality underlying apparent nature, we 
may get some idea of the supreme Reality by con- 
sidering the apparent reality; or in more personal 
terms, we may judge of the Creator by his crea- 
tion. ‘This is the method which gives all the 
brightness, color, and form to the picture of God, 
and makes the knowledge of him concrete. Its 
validity depends upon the closeness of the relation 
between God and the world. If the world is very 
far gone from the God who made it, or of course 
if God did not make it at all, but took it as he 
found it, then one must be very distrustful of at- 
tributing anything worldlike to God, and this 
method is radically unsound. But if, for example, 
we think of the world as “the body of God,” we 
are consistent in treating God as somehow world- 
like. If, again, God is the Consummation of 


14 GOD AND REALITY 


Value, we get inductive knowledge of his attributes 
from the concrete values, the good things, of our 
own experience. 

Revelation is, in Christian doctrine of God, gen- 
erally named as a third source of our knowledge of 
God. But, without any wish to deny it or obscure 
it in the least, we may take it as a heightening of 
the other methods rather than as a third and co- 
ordinate method itself. Even if revelation is a 
definite dictation of propositions to men, it is a 
matter of showing what is involved in the primary 
idea of the Divine, or of showing what is good and 
real in human experience. On the whole, I think 
revelation is best regarded as coming within the 
sphere of our experience: this does not in the least 
militate against its being supernaturally, even 
miraculously, caused. Revelation, then, is a highly 
significant part of human experience, from which 
we inductively derive some knowledge of God. 

Another set of distinctions in the way of ascer- 
taining the divine attributes is the ancient classifica- 
tion of the via affirmationis, via negationis, and via 
superlationis. How ancient it is will sufficiently 
appear later; it was very explicitly reasoned out by 
the Pseudo-Dionysius, and has been a part of the 
apparatus of theology ever since; but of course the 
essence of the procedure was going on for many 
ages before the Pseudo-Dionysius. It does not 


IDEAS OF GOD ts 


quite fit in with the distinction made above, of de- 
ductive analysis and inductive synthesis, but it 
comes near to being a subdivision of the latter. In 
reasoning ‘“‘through Nature to God,” we afhirm 
something positive, we deny something in it, and 
we finally reconcile the two by a superlative. This 
is fundamental, and must be examined more 
closely. 

The via affirmationis, (801s), also called via 
causalitatis, depends on the relation of God to 
nature. If that is a causal relation, there is some 
likeness between effects in nature and the God who 
caused them. If God causes life, he is a life-giver, 
he is that sort of being. A house is like its builder, 
a picture looks like its painter, a novel is like its 
author, everything made by a man has in it some- 
thing that is also in the mind of its maker.*. Or if 
causality is rejected, and still God is thought of as 
the Ultimate Reality of the apparent universe, that 
relation is still close enough to warrant a belief in 
some likeness. This via affirmationis is the first 
and most obvious step in the inductive process of 
learning something about the divine attributes. 

If God and the universe are one and the same, 


1The “way of causation” means, directly, that the cause is 
capable of producing the effect, rather than that the cause is like 
the effect. Even so, I think we naturally attribute to a cause 
some likeness to its effects: like produces like, especially in per- 
sonal causation. 


16 GOD AND REALITY 


the via affirmationis is all-sufficing so far as getting 
data is concerned, and for scientific theology all 
that will be needed besides is systematic arrange- 
ment. But if God is superior to anything at all, 
and especially if he is not only superior but su- 
preme, the positive way needs to be corrected 
by the negative way, via negationis (ddaipecrs). 
The house is not just like its builder, the picture 
does not look just like its painter, novels are not 
exact autobiographies, the thing made does not 
perfectly duplicate the whole mind of the maker, 
the apparent reality is not exactly like the Ultimate 
Reality—at least we have no warrant for saying 
that it is. | 

If God is only superior, not supreme, the via 
negationis will consist in denying some limitations 
and imperfections. ‘The primitive finite God, for 
instance, is not limited by ordinary means of loco- 
motion. If God is supreme and perfect, we deny 
all imperfections. It is easy to feel the apparent 
sterility of this point of view, and in extreme cases, 
like that of the Neoplatonists, we feel that the net 
result of this persistent denying—denying power, 
goodness, substance, even being—is an awe-inspir- 
ing emptiness, with God an infinitely colossal zero. 
They made a void, and called it God. But even in 
these extreme manifestations, so long as the denial 
is really of an imperfection or a limitation, it is a 


IDEAS OF GOD 17 


negation of a negation, a double negative which 
makes an afirmative. It is not so where the denial 
is of any sufficiently close relation of God to nature 
to allow of reasoning from qualities in the one to 
like qualities in the other: in this there is unre- 
lieved negation, saying not that God 1s not imper- 
fect as nature is, but that God is not like nature at 
all. No essay in theology is complete nowadays 
without reference to Dr. Rudolf Otto’s study of 
non-rational human awe in the presence of the 
Totally Other: this brings out with striking illu- 
mination our natural religious taking of the via 
negationis, conceived as a denying, not simply of 
limitation, but of likeness. ‘Che thoroughly the- 
istic use of the via negationis, however, is in con- 
trast to this: it is a rational denial of badness, or 
weakness, or any limitation; and this makes it a 
very positive negation. 

The via negationis is easily confused with denial 
of our ability to take cognizance of Deity. In- 
sistence on imperfection in our knowledge is of 
course a perfectly safe and sane thing, but it is not 
the same as denial of imperfection in God. And 
the latter is the full meaning of the via negationis 
in developed theism, where God is the Ultimate 
Reality and Absolute Perfection. 

Much as if it were a case in the Hegelian dia- 
lectic, the afirmation and the negation are recon- 


18 GOD AND REALITY 


ciled in a synthesis, formed by a superlative. This 
is the via superlationis, or via eminentiae  (¥mepoxy). 
We know life; and we say God is lwing; 
but he is not living in the mere biological sense 
known to us; he is Life. God knows; but he does 
not know in our groping psychological fashion; he 
is omniscient. We take any valuable thing in our 
experience; we say God is like that; but no, he is 
not like that in its imperfections; he is perfectly, 
supremely, superlatively, that which the thing is 
imperfectly. Attributes so derived abound in the 
termination -issimus, or the prefix omni- or super- 
The Pseudo-Dionysius soars to such heights as 
“‘superexisting superdeity’ (De Divinis Nomini- 
bus 13), which has rather a modern ring. 

There may be a milder use of this via eminentiae 
in honor of a finite God, in which case only a com- 
parative, not a superlative, will be used. The 
superlatives all depend on the root-idea that the 
Ultimate Reality is perfect. 

Now these three ‘‘ways”’ to such analogical ideas 
of God’s nature are in full-blown theism all in use, 
as mutually complementary. But there are wide 
differences between individuals and between reli- 
gions in the relative importance attached to each. 
Some are confident in following the via affirmativa, 
because their idea is of a God who is emphatically 
God of this universe, real as nature is real, and 


IDEAS OF GOD 19 


considerably like his universe. Others are more 
sensitive to the imperfections of all that we see, 
and turn to negation as their favorite form for 
divine attributes, because their idea of Deity is 
nothing if not infinite, ultimate, perfect, and the 
divine otherness or “‘holiness”’ is his most jealously 
guarded predicate. Those to whom the via super- 
lationis means most are convinced of the comple- 
mentary validity of the other two viae: they must 
have both the affirmations and the denials, the like- 
ness and the unlikeness, and the only way in which 
they can have both is the way of eminence. So the 
great tap-root ideas of God are developed out to 
some fulness of content, and the ways of develop- 
ment have differences according as one or another 
of the primary ideas predominates. 

It all sounds too exasperatingly formal, arti- 
ficial, abstract—that is acknowledged. And if 
anyone wishes to protest that it is unreal, out of 
touch with life, and that our experience and knowl- 
edge of God does not grow in any such dialectical 
fashion at all, he will not meet with any fierce 
rebuttal. ‘The unpredictable flashing up of some 
new light upon God and his universe, the shifting 
of attention to this or that object or idea, the 
dominance of interest, impulse, feeling, in religious 
knowledge, the changes and chances by which at 
times we seem to have a simple awareness of some- 


20 GOD AND REALITY 


thing divine, and at other times what has appeared 
so luminous unaccountably clouds over and goes 
dark, the slipping back as well as the pushing for- 
ward in our grasp of facts and principles—all 
these things are admitted. And it is admitted that 
they are pertinent, and weighty against any sup- 
position that we may reason out a logically satis- 
fying theory of God’s essence and hold it as a 
steady intellectual possession for the guidance of 
our life. 

But the rich, living turmoil of our experience, 
including the most chaotic religious experience, is 
included in our formula, as that out of which we 
try to produce general principles. It is the con- 
crete data for theology, as the via affirmationis 
says. Theology is based on belief that reason can 
get some satisfaction from expressing life in gen- 
eral terms, instead of merely registering impres- 
sions as they come. It is essentially the same satis- 
faction that we got in our elementary schooling in 
reducing apples to algebra. It is the same love of 
abstraction that makes a salesman say, “This is a 
very good number,” over and over again, when 
what we want is not a number at all, but a hat or 
umbrella. 

At the beginning of this twentieth century, 
William James, in his eighteenth lecture on the 
Varieties of Religious Experience, read a long sec- 


IDEAS OF GOD 21 


tion of Newman’s Idea of a University on the 
fundamental traits of the Christian idea of God, 
gave it high praise as ‘magnificent rhetoric,” and 
then, suggesting the question, “What is its cash- 
value in terms of particular experience?” applied 
the pragmatic test to metaphysical theology, in his 
own superb style of rhetoric: 

‘.. . surely the systematic theologians are the 
closet-naturalists of the deity. . . . What is their 
deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling 
and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, 
aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, 
something that might be worked out from the mere 
word ‘God’ by one of those logical machines of 
wood and brass which recent ingenuity has con- 
trived as well as by a manof fleshand blood. They 
have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels 
that in the theologians’ hands, they are only a set 
of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of 
synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of 
vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead 
of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a ser- 
pent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract 
terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the 
deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to 
flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have 
taken its flight from this world. What keeps reli- 
gion going is something else than abstract defini- 


22 GOD AND REALITY 


tions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and 
something different from faculties of theology and 
their professors. All these things are after-effects, 
secondary accretions upon those phenomena of 
vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which 
I have shown you so many instances, renewing 
themselves in saecula saeculorum in the lives of 
humble private men.” 

It was fitting that we should have this rebuke 
before us now—and there are pages and pages just 
as good—-since it is our intention here to be “‘closet- 
naturalists of the deity,” to match dictionary- 
adjectives, to see what may be “‘worked out from 
the mere word ‘God’”’ by a logical machine of 
wood and brass, to make a sympathetic study of 
‘secondary accretions’? upon the phenomena of 
vital religion. James allows merit in the “attempt 
to extract from the privacies of religious experi- 
ence some general facts which can be defined in 
formulas.’’ But he wishes to discredit an intel- 
lectualism which “assumes to construct religious 
objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, 
or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference 
from non-subjective facts.’’ His quarrel with the 
theologians then is over the extent of the subject- 
matter: theoogians seemed to him to make their 
doctrines out of “non-subjective facts’; he would 
make them out of the subjective facts of religious 


IDEAS OF GOD 23 


experience. He has brought forward in the clear- 
est way a class of data which theologians had 
somewhat neglected: and we hope his lesson will 
never be forgotten. But we cannot agree to rule 
out even the most abstract, metaphysical, logical 
constructions from the realm of subjective facts, 
and facts of religious experience. 

While antipathy to metaphysical theology has 
not cooled off entirely since Ritschl and William 
James, there is, I think, now a growing disposition 
to rehabilitate it. Unless I entirely misunderstand 
Raotessors, blocking,’ ‘Perry,’ Sheldony) Cy C.J. 
Webb, and others, and unless I am quite mistaken 
in estimating their strength, there is a great deal 
more justification, among philosophers, of a theol- 
ogy that is also in part a theory of the universe 
than there was a quarter-century ago. And as for 
popular interests, | am quite in agreement with 
President Bell that the young people of to-day are 
much more vitally and religiously interested in 
metaphysics than in ethics.?, And if in these lec- 
tures I avoid metaphysical discussions (except in 

2H. A. Moran, A Creed for College Men, reviewed by B. I. 
Bell in American Church Monthly, June, 1925. “Mr. Moran 
knows that the primary religious interest of undergraduates is in 
metaphysics rather than ethics. They wish to know in whom 
or what they can trust as eternally true, and refuse obstinately, 
no matter how much they are urged, to be content with codes of 
living. They instinctively and correctly feel that no code of 


ethics is worth considering except on the basis of its metaphysical 
sanction.” 


24 GOD AND REALITY 


the broadest sense of the term), that will not be 
because metaphysics is unwelcome in theology, but 
because it is too difficult for the lecturer. 

We have glanced at some few of the enormous 
number of present-day expressions of the main 
ideas of God. They have seemed to group them- 
selves into a very few large classes of ideas—God 
is a powerful Object, or (as this idea is philoso- 
phized) the Ultimate Reality; or God is a good 
Object, or (more philosophically) the Perfection 
of all Value; or, as is far more usual, God is both 
Reality and Value. From the primary idea and 
its relation to the universe develop the fuller con- 
crete pictures of the divine Being, by a reasoned or 
unreasoned use of afirmatives, negatives, and su- 
perlatives. 

Bearing in mind the difference suggested be- 
tween degrees of superiority up to supremacy, we 
shall see a type of God-idea which claims nothing 
ultimate, but thinks of a God that is a real and 
powerful Object, with a thisness which distin- 
guishes him sharply from the environment. Log- 
ically, I suppose there should correspond to the 
finite-reality God a finite-value God; but practically 
we can take the finite God as one idea. 

Secondly, there is a type of God-idea which 
defines the Deity as consummate Value. The Idea 
of the Good, Perfection, Ideality, Sum of all 


IDEAS OF GOD 25 


values—these are some alternative expressions 
which denote substantially the same general notion. 

Thirdly, there is a type of God-idea which de- 
fines the Deity as Ultimate Reality. There are 
many virtual synonyms for this, for theologians 
and philosophers seem to vie with one another in 
seeking expressive terms. Ens a se, the World- 
ground, the Ground of all existence, First Reality, 
Prime Mover, First Cause, Supreme Being, Abso- 
lute (sometimes )—all these mean, with some dif- 
ference of shading, about the same concept. 

I wish to be clear. If reference is repeatedly 
made to the object-God, the first general type of 
theological idea is meant; the value-God means the 
second; the ultimate-reality-God means the third. 
If these terms have an unlovely brusqueness, I 
hope that will not appear irreverent, for it is only 
for the sake of clearness, as if one should call them 
respectively A, B, and C (which would never do, 
of course). 

A second lecture will sketch some history of 
these ideas. And then each of the leading types 
will be appraised as well as I can do it, to the end 
of apprehending its positive soundness, its develop- 
ment into the detail of divine attributes, and its 
defects when it stands alone or is over-emphasized. 
No new idea of God will be proposed: if any of 
the doctrines suggested as fundamental is not ac- 


26 GOD AND REALITY 


tually fundamental in the religion of many people 
of many ages, I shall have made an error in men- 
tioning it. For all these reachings-out after a 
concept which may not too pitifully fail to symbol- 
ize the Being that is thought of under the title of 
God are, or seem to be, great general tendencies 
of the human mind in response to all that stimu- 
lates it, and in such matters anything quite new 
would be quite out of place. 


CHAPTER II 
DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF GOD 


THE Christian doctrine of God, for a time, was 
stable enough so that the name of God could be 
confidently used, and relied upon to call up a fairly 
standardized idea. This was the legacy of the 
early patristic period, and it was maintained fairly 
intact, let us say, from the time of Origen to the 
time of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. At 
least this is true in comparison with earlier and 
later periods. Certainly when Clement and Origen 
were at work the Christian doctrine of God ap- 
peared as a very unstable compound. And cer- 
tainly it appears so in modern thought. 

Without venturing very far back toward the 
first dawning of religious ideas, we may note, as an 
early enough stage to begin with, the primitive 
supernaturalism which conceived of an upper 
world of Gods or semi-material spirits who occa- 
sionally intervene in the world. The God is em- 
phatically an Object. And there is always some 
kind and degree of superiority in the supernatural 

27 


28 GOD AND REALITY 


beings, generally a superiority of power, if not a 
supremacy. In the early Hebrew religion it would 
appear that special, all but exclusive, attention 
came to be paid to one God, always thought of as 
a being in action, a Storm-God (riding upon the 
wings of the wind), or a Volcano-God (a cloud by 
day and a pillar of fire by night), then understood 
more personally, even anthropomorphically, as the 
tribal War-God. Because he is personal, free, and 
active, he is increasingly thought of as ethically 
good and righteous. At the same time, there is 
development of the belief in his power, so that in 
the age of the Prophets there was a true ethical 
monotheism, which finds in the upper world of the 
supernatural only one God, who is Maker of all, 
Ruler of all, perfectly righteous, the Father who 
loves his children. ‘This result is so familiar to us, 
and so easily taken for granted by Christians, that 
the amazing uniqueness of the development fails 
to amaze us as it should. 

Whether there was a great change manifest in 
the apocryphal and apocalyptic literature has been 
a matter for scholarly dispute. Much point was 
made not long ago of a great increase of transcend- 
ence in the idea of God held by these writers: 
God, it seemed, was exalted farther and farther 
away trom mundane concerns, so that it was an 
impertinence to expect him to deal directly with the 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 29 


world, intermediaries were postulated to operate 
between the Infinite and the creation, the anthropo- 
morphisms of the earlier stages of the religion 
were nervously avoided or palliated in the later, 
and the very Name of the God of Israel was 
taboo. No one denies that there was some such 
tendency, but later scholars, especially those sym- 
pathetic with Judaism, seem much concerned to 
warn us against exaggeration in this direction. It 
would seem well established that the transcendent 
otherness or holiness of God was more thought of 
in later Judaism than before, but that at all events 
the Jews never lost their belief in prayer and such 
(really quite essential) immediacy as is involved 
in prayer. If anyone can effectually turn to God 
in prayer whenever he will, transcendence is not 
aloofness. 

Further, it cannot be doubted that the later 
Judaism developed a luxuriant belief in what have 
been called “intermediaries,” and “hypostases,” 
and various associates of God, or associations of 
God, or emanations from him, or aspects of his 
life, or semi-personified attributes, or semi-divine 
persons—pictorially a gorgeous assemblage, an in- 
finitely regal court, which serves as an eminent 
instance of the “‘sultanic” conception of God. Of 
these associates of the divine life, some seem to 
have been more divine and less personal, others 


30 GOD AND REALITY 


more personal and less divine. The Name, the 
Glory, the Spirit, were divine but not distinctly 
persons; the Angels and in some minds the celestial 
Messiah were persons but not distinctly divine. 
The religion of our Lord Jesus Christ is norma- 
tive for our religion; but little of it is directly 
reported—little was reportable. The relations 
between him and the Father constitute the main- 
spring of Christianity: they are revealed in a 
measure; but our apprehension of them depends 
greatly on the depth and delicacy of our own reli- 
gious sense; only a comparatively hard outward 
shell of them is presented in such direct teachings 
as we have from him on the meaning of God. 
And a still less full and living expression of Christ’s 
thought of God is that given in our own attempts 
at summarizing it and placing it in the history of 
doctrine. If Harnack sees in his teaching of the 
divine Fatherhood the primary originality of our 
Lord, it is not difficult for others to show that this 
was not original with him at all—that the Jews 
were quite used to the idea that God is our Father. 
If we emphasize our Lord’s teaching of the divine 
forgiveness, it may be maintained that he taught 
rather how God would not forgive unless we our- 
selves forgave others. It is even possible, if we 
confine ourselves to the text of his direct teaching 


on the subject, to hold with Dr. McGiffert that 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 31 


‘his concern was not so much with divine forgive- 
ness as with human.” * 

What is distinctly maintained by our Lord is 
that God is “in heaven,” supremely great in his 
ever-present control of affairs, especially little 
affairs, an ever-present Personality, having intense 
concern for all things, no matter how insignificant. 
In his goodness (none is good in the full sense but 
God) he communicates with man by voices, angels, 
and dreams, and he hears men’s prayer. He 1s 
personally omnipresent, thoroughly in touch with 
every least detail, leaving no gap between a thing 
and his complete knowledge of it. This does not 
mean, of course, either transcendence or im- 
manence exclusively, but the closest connection of 
the Infinite with every detail of the finite. It 
makes for a thoroughly God-friendly, God-inti- 
mate religion. 

Such is the ‘God of the Jews,” as progressively 
revealed. The Apostles inherited this theology 
without question. But St. Paul and St. John, at 
any rate, while they kept this idea, and apparently 
meant this most often when they referred to God, 
broadened the idea of Deity so as to make it a 
Something sharable and shared by the Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Holy Spirit, and (though far less) by 


1The God of the Early Christians, 11, 


32 GOD AND REALITY 


Christians. Did this make much difference in 
men’s thought of God? 

1. The belief that the divine life is shared by 
other persons than God the Father makes a dif- 
ference. Some sort of social sharing of experience 
is involved in the Jewish ideas of a celestial hier- 
archy, so the change is not without preparation. 
But, as Dr. McGiffert shows (putting the contrast 
very sharply), there is quite a difference between 
God as a separate and distinct person and God as 
‘spiritual substance in which Christians may share 
as well as Christ.” *? The former conception taken 
alone would suggest a person isolated from other 
persons by a circumference, a wall on the outside, 
so to speak, as we might say that a man in his indi- 
viduality is separated from other men by the out- 
line of his body. The latter conception (God as 
spiritual substance) suggests, if it is personal at 
all, a person as a centre of unity for an indefinitely 
expansive life, distinct from other such centres 
rather as an intersection-point for many lines is 
distinct from other intersection-points, but with- 
out circumference, the lines radiating out to 
an unlimited extent, as we might say that a 
human person is a centre of unity for an unlim- 
ited range of experience, most of which is sharable 
by other men. In other words, the older idea was 


2 The God of the Early Christians, 33. 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 33 


of personality considered as exclusive, an idea 
which, because exclusive, has been found objection- 
able as applied to God; people have shrunk from 
calling God personal because of this limitation in 
the idea of personality. But if a person is not a 
centre of utter separateness, but a centre of unity 
for a nature which may reach infinitely far, that 
objection loses its sting. The word “individual” 
is used generally as if it meant something divided 
from everything else: it really means something 
not divided in itself. “Thus the thought of God the 
Father as a Person who has a sharable nature is 
an idea fruitful right up to the present for the 
enlargement of the meaning of personality. One 
might perhaps venture the surmise that the idea of 
the personality of God might have been dropped 
by the fourth century as unworthy of the Infinite, 
if it had not been enhanced by the complementary 
idea of the sharable nature, the spiritual substance. 

2. The belief that Jesus shares in the divine 
nature is necessarily based on the apprehension 
that his visible human character is like the divine. 
Is it reasoning in a circle then to say that therefore 
the divine character is like what we see in Jesus? 
It is perilously near that to say that we know noth- 
ing of God except what we find in Jesus: if we 
have no antecedent idea of God, it is hard to see 
any sense in saying that Jesus is God: ‘They said, 


34 GOD AND REALITY 


It is manna; for they wist not what it was.” But 
perhaps an analogy will help. We read an anony- 
mous article; the main drift of it, some chief char- 
acteristics of it, convince us that it was written by 
A, some of whose work we know; then, when so 
convinced we can find out more about the author 
from the article itself than we knew before. In 
some such way perhaps, having recognized God in 
Jesus, believers have found more of God in Jesus 
than they could have known otherwise. 

Are there any divine attributes in particular 
that have been so incorporated into the growing 
idea of God through beholding them in Christ? 
The divine humility, the compassion, the self- 
sacrificing love, the not-hitting-back, were clearly 
revealed, and unmistakably recorded by St. Paul, 
St. John, and the author of Hebrews, as a result 
of the life of Christ. 

This Jewish religious development is the main 
line from which is descended the classical Christian 
doctrine of God. On the whole, it is anthropo- 
morphic, though with reservations—‘‘God is not 
a man, that he should repent.’ God is the su- 
preme Power of the universe, for “‘in his hand are 
all the corners of the earth,” but there is no large 
philosophical idea of the universe, or even of the 
whole of humankind. No doubt the hostility of 
great world-powers to the Jews had much to do 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 35 


with this. ‘There is no danger here of Deity be- 
coming an abstraction, and no danger of panthe- 
ism. God is a concrete Reality, a definite Object, 
empirically real, rather than (though not exclusive 
of) Ultimate Reality, or anything ultimate or uni- 
versal. Again, the anthropomorphism, since it is 
an idealizing anthropomorphism, and especially 
since it includes the ascribing of Christlike qualities 
to God, means that God is Goodness, supreme 
moral Value. At the point we have reached, then, 
the idea of God includes something of the Ground- 
of-all-existence idea, more of the Immediately- 
real-in-experience, but most of all of the Supreme- 
moral value. 


II 


There can be no doubt that the Christian doc- 
trine of God is a synthesis of Jewish and Greek 
ideas. [he environment of the Greek thought- 
world had affected Judaism somewhat before 
Christ; when we come to St. Paul and St. John it 
is clear that some (the dispute is as to the quan- 
tity) Greek ideas have found lodgment in their 
theology; later, of course, the Hellenic influence is 
obvious. 

The old pagan supernaturalism, revealed in 
Homer, contained as little of the idea of Ultimate 
Reality, or of an adequate universe-idea, as did 


36 GOD AND REALITY 


early Hebrew religion—perhaps less. It certainly 
contained less of the goodness-value in Deity. Its 
strength was in conceiving of a God as a definite 
concrete Reality, very distinctly a “this” or a 
“that,” an object real in our experience, not every- 
thing in general but something in particular. The 
number of such finite beings, whether one or a 
multitude, is of little consequence: if you are going 
to have a finite God, you might as well have a lot 
of them. 

But the old paganism in itself tended toward 
either pantheism or monotheism. A doctrine of 
“divine monarchy” kept asserting itself in the ex- 
pression “Father of Gods and men’’; and a doc- 
trine of Deity, a quality or substance common to all 
Gods, was long implied without being defined. I 
suppose polytheism leads to pantheism more easily 
than a strict personal monotheism does, because 
polytheism is likely to have a God for every known 
reality of the universe; it is more prepared to 
include the whole of things under the category of 
the divine. 

Plato did not work from the many Gods to the 
one God: he left the many Gods alone. But he 
worked from appearance to Being; he sought for 
ultimate reality, and found it in the world of (ob- 
jectively real) ideas; within this pantheon he 
sought for the supreme idea, and found it in the 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 37 


Idea of the Good and Beautiful; and when he had 
found it he at least thought of calling it God. God 
as a concrete fact and object of experience is prac- 
tically not in Plato, unless we may suppose that he 
let the old pagan Gods stand for that aspect of 
Deity. God as the Ultimate Reality is of the 
essence of Platonism. God as the perfect ideal of 
Value is equally essential. The ultimate reality is 
the Idea of the Good. 

Aristotle sought a better connection between 
real ideas and apparent things, and found it in the 
relation of cause. The first cause, itself uncaused, 
is pure mind, which acts purposefully in nature; 
and this is God. Aristotle thus depends on the 
cosmological and teleological arguments; and of 
course one can tell something of a person’s defini- 
tion of God from the arguments he uses for God’s 
existence. Aristotle looked for a first cause; he 
found it rational, because the effects caused by it 
are rational; he called it God. God as the Sum of 
Values, especially moral values, is not Aristotle’s 
God; his idea of Deity does not allow for a con- 
crete real Object in immediate experience—it is not 
very religious, in the ordinary sense; God is to 
him primarily the Ground of all Existence, the way 
of accounting for the universe. And if such an 
idea of Divinity seems cold, and leaves us cold, it 
at least envisages a universe worthy of the name, 


38 GOD AND REALITY 


magnificent in its proportions, and organically 
articulated in itself through being organically 
articulated with its First Principle. More can be 
said even for the religious value of this meta- 
physical idea of God, as I hope will appear later. 

The Stoics were more monistic than this. ‘The 
universe is all “of one substance,’ and that ma- 
terial. But within the one substance there is an 
active principle and a passive principle. ‘The 
active principle in matter, though itself material, is 
of such refined texture as to have practically all the 
attributes of mind. The Supreme Active Principle 
or Soul of the World is wise and good, and can be 
addressed religiously as a person, as in Marcus 
Aurelius’ act of faith, “Everything is harmonious 
to me that is harmonious to thee, O Universe.” 
Of the chief contents of the idea of God, Stoicism 
exalted the Ultimate Reality, made little of the 
divine perfection, and scarcely anything of the 
concrete Object of religion. 

Neoplatonism and the mystery religions both 
telt the need of something more religiously satis- 
fying than pantheism. Both wished to attain to 
some personal communication with the Divine, in 
an experience which could be emotionally felt and 
recognized as such. The mystery religions, in 
order to gain this, left out metaphysics and the 
universe and the thought of God as Ultimate Real- 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 39 


ity, and found something like salvation in the ini- 
tiate’s fellowship with the Lord of the cult, satis- 
fied with an immediately apprehensible Object of 
Religion. But the Neoplatonists austerely refused 
such easy satisfaction. They would pay no atten- 
tion to any God who was anything less than the 
Absolute, Perfect, Ultimate; and yet they could 
not be satisfied with an unapproachable God. 
They exalted the divine transcendence to the far- 
thest extreme of the via negativa, refusing to at- 
tribute to God any positive qualities, even exist- 
ence, for fear of ascribing limitation to the In- 
finite. ‘To them God was anything but a this or 
that Object; he was beyond all moral value, be- 
yond all comparison with what we call good here. 
And yet, without the slightest compromising of 
transcendence, they endeavored to reach com- 
munion with God, friendship with the Absolute. 
It was heroic, a tour-de-force of aspiring spirit- 
uality. 

This Greek tradition fused with the Jewish tra- 
dition to produce Christian theology. Now as 
regards the idea of God, while the Greeks were 
not without some idea of personal, anthropo- 
morphic, concrete and definite Deity, their signif- 
cant movement of thought was toward belief in a 
God that is the Ground of all Existence, of the 
whole universe. ‘The universe-idea was vastly bet- 


4O GOD AND REALITY 


ter grasped by them than by the Jews, and the 
idea of God was great enough to be adequate for 
the great universe-idea. One needs only to think 
for a moment of Jehovah and the Absolute to see 
how radically different the one theism is from the 
other, how necessary was the supplementing of the 
one by the other if either was to survive, and how 
almost unthinkably difficult any synthesis must be. 


Til 


There were Christians of both lines of descent 
who never got anywhere near a synthesis. Some 
were content with a Jehovah who had made the 
world as a potter makes a pot, and who ruled and 
loved his children as a father does: the anthropo- 
morphic God of the Jews sufficed them. Dr. 
McGiffert has presented as strong a case as could 
possibly be put, I should think, for the existence 
of many early Gentile Christians to whom the God 
of the Jews was as nothing, but the (even more 
anthropomorphic, of course) Lord Christ was all 
the God they needed for salvation. Even the 
Gnostics, syncretic as their theology was, found no 
worthy place for the God of the Jews. 

We have already noticed the suggestion that the 
Christians, in letting their idea of God include the 
divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, committed 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 41 


themselves to belief in a divine spiritual substance, 
shared by different persons. ‘[his important modi- 
fication is conscious and explicit in St. Paul and St. 
John. Where the persons thought of are divine 
Persons, this doctrine of the one sharable sub- 
stance becomes permanent wherever there is be- 
lief in the Trinity, for it is necessary to that belief. 
Where the persons concerned include human per- 
sons, this same thought of the sharable divine sub- 
stance means mysticism, of course, and mysticism 
of a most intense character. It is not simply com- 
munication of God with men, however direct and 
personal, but it is communication of God to men, 
an imparting of the divine nature in measure to the 
members of Christ, as a sort of ferment or toxin 
or leaven, which grows in a man until it transub- 
stantiates him. ‘That is how a sinner is saved: he 
is admitted to such an organic relation with Christ 
that he begins to be a partaker of the divine na- 
ture, he receives more and more of this infused 
grace, and (making all due allowance for hyper- 
bole) he is divinized. 

‘“Partakers of the divine nature” is a favorite 
New Testament text where this is the favorite 
principle of salvation. Similar expressions are in 
St. Ignatius. St. Irenaeus found the idea most 
fruitful, and cultivated it; in him we find the full- 
blown doctrine of Oeéwo.s, that we receive an in- 


42 GOD AND REALITY 


flow of immortal and incorruptible nature from 
the divine Word, until in a sense we become gods. 
St. Clement of Alexandria and St. Athanasius also 
saw rich values in this doctrine, and though it is 
to be credited especially to the Eastern Fathers, it 
is in stronger or milder form a permanent thing in 
Christianity as a whole. Perhaps we need to be 
reminded that this is the fundamental idea in the 
giving of the Holy Spirit, communion of the Body 
and Blood of Christ, what Dr. Preserved Smith 
calls Christian Theophagy, infused grace, im- 
parted righteousness, and such quite general Chris- 
tian ideas. 

Evidently the main-spring of motive for this 
theology is the will to be saved. It is a doctrine 
of God from the point of view of the salvation of 
men. It is in most books treated under soteriol- 
ogy, and it is a rather deadly soteriology that dis- 
regards it, preferring legal or propitiatory-sacri- 
ficial analogies: it would seem that the associations 
of the law-court and of the slaughter-house are 
about equally unedifying; those of the dining-room 
or even the hospital are surely better. At any 
rate, as doctrine of God, this mystical-atonement 
theology represents Deity as sharable substance, 
shared by Father, Son, and Spirit, and by human 
members of the Body of Christ. 

The divine substance thus came into theology 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 43 


from religion, and it came to stay. At least it has 
had an assured place through most of Christian 
history, though to many minds, especially in mod- 
ern times, it has been a bugaboo. In ordinary 
speech, substance means stuff. It connotes stuff 
that remains constant, though its conditions and 
appearances may change. In philosophy, perhaps 
the most inclusive definition, the least colored by a 
particular theory, is that substance is that which is 
and abides. Substance is that which justifies the 
use of nouns—we were taught to call them sub- 
stantives, in fact—instead of merely adjectives. 
Now I venture to think that with most people the 
philosophical and the popular ideas of substance 
are equated—that which is and abides is stuff, or 
matter, perhaps very attenuated matter, or only 
to be thought of by the analogy of matter, or from 
a quasi-material point of view. I hope I may be 
permitted to use the term in this way: substance is 
that which is and abides, somewhat as we expe- 
rience matter as being; the substance of a thing 
is what it is in terms of the stuff, or quasi-stuff, 
of which it consists. Of course, it will be under- 
stood that I am not concerned directly with the 
analysis of the term substance, for the term was 
not used by all the Fathers under consideration; 
what is needed is some term to designate that 
which God is and always is, which is shared by the 


44 GOD AND REALITY 


Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and is even 
communicated to men; many theologians use the 
term substance for that, and I think they use it 
in the sense indicated above. Those who impa- 
tiently reject it do so, I believe, because of the 
material point of view, or analogy, which it sug- 
gests. Some of these second-century Fathers 
found no difficulty in thinking of a highly refined 
matter, soul-stuff, of which God consists; but sub- 
stance is not necessarily matter. There is in Chris- 
tian theology a place for spirit-substance; but this 
views spirit on the analogy of a kind of stuff. To 
think of God as substance, then, is to carry up into 
the thought of the infinite Divine something posi- 
tive in our experience of things here; and that is 
(as I hope we shall agree) sound so long as the 
limitations of the lower experience are sloughed 
off. 

The question of what kind is the substance of 
God was, when raised, answered variously. That 
is, all agree that ‘“‘God is spirit,”’ but do not agree 
on what spirit is. The hereditary Jewish idea 
was more or less materialistic. And in the Graeco- 
Roman world, Stoicism also was a refined and re- 
ligious materialism. Tertullian as Christian 
theologian argues directly for the corporeality of 
God. To him as to the Stoics, the only real sub- 
stance we know is material substance; this includes 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 45 


spirit as an extremely refined material. And his 
theological method is as significant as his result. 
It is the via causationis: we judge of the Cause of 
things by the actual effects, the Creator by his 
creation. If God is the Creator of the material 
universe, there must be some materiality in him. 
The strength of this method hes in its positive 
claim that the Ultimate Reality must be like the 
immediate reality which we know. ‘The same 
method is used for the spirituality, personality, 
and moral goodness of God. Its danger lies in 
a certain lack of caution in attributing the limita- 
tions of the observed to the Infinite Reality under- 
lying it: it always needs correction by the via 
negationis. But with Tertullian corporeality was 
no limitation, no mark of finiteness, but something 
positively real, and ultimately real. 

It is very likely that Tertullian had most Chris- 
tians with him on this point up to his own time. 
St. Clement of Alexandria was the first great theo- 
logian to maintain the divine incorporeality: 
Origen, who followed the same line and carried 
it further, admits that deoparos was a new term in 
Christian theology; he insists that it is true, 
nevertheless, and must be used philosophically, 
that is, Platonically.* Like all Platonists, Clement 


8 Robert P. Casey, Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings 
of Christian Platonism; in Harvard Theological Review, Janu- 
ary, 1925. 


46 GOD AND REALITY 


and Origen saw practically nothing in matter that 
was not limitation: by the via negationis, all di- 
mensions and even position, every material qual- 
ity, must be abstracted from the idea of the divine 
essence. In fact, the Ultimate Reality is not to 
be apprehended even on the analogy of things be- 
held, but on the analogy of a beholder, a mind. 
Altogether, it is evident that the via negationis was 
far and away the favorite Platonic way to the 
doctrine of God: we know not what he is, but what 
he isnot. And yet we must not take this sweeping 
saying as if it summed up the whole of Clement 
and Origen: for them God means Absolute Real- 
ity and Absolute Goodness; his substance is abso- 
lutely immaterial intellect, so far as we know of 
it; but “above this world of immaterial reality is 
the sphere of God’s transcendence, to which the 
soul occasionally rises in ecstatic vision, and below 
is the sphere of common life, where the presence 
of God is communicated sacramentally, in moral 
choice, in obedience to the divine will, in the per- 
ception of beauty, and in the cultivation of divine 
Lovers 

Christian thought eventually chose this belief 
in the incorporeality of the divine substance in 
preference to Tertullian’s refined materialism. 
The fact that it met the question fairly and so 


* Casey, I.c., 80. 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 47 


chose is one of the notable signs that a genuinely 
theological period had been reached. 

During the same period, and in part by the same 
persons, there was direct comparison of the Chris- 
tian idea of God with polytheistic ideas. It is 
obvious that the Apologists made a great point 
of monotheism, commending the one God of the 
Old Testament by (crude enough) use of Greek 
philosophical monotheism. But more even than 
the divine unity, they preached the moral perfec- 
tion of God, and found therein an overwhelming 
advantage over their opponents. It was sound 
Judaism and sound Platonism alike that God is 
the sum of all manner of righteousness. And the 
Apologists, in using philosophy to combat. the 
popular immoral polytheism, helped forward the 
synthesis which makes up the Christian doctrine, 
though in this matter there was little or no original 
thinking, and the old polytheism was too easy an 
opponent to bring out the best abilities of any who 
might attack it. 

The greatest explicit theological question, how- 
ever, which was before the men of this time was 
the question how God is related to the world. 
Gnosticism brought this to the fore. On the sur- 
face the question seems to be how to account for 
the world, God being assumed. But in truth any 
doctrine of creation is simply a doctrine of God 


48 GOD AND REALITY 


reversed: we work up from creation to a Creator, 
and then look back on the process, look down, as 
it were, from the Creator to the creation; we get 
simply the same data from a different point of 
view, the same relation from the other end, and 
the trip is the same length either way. If we be- 
lieve in God because of what we see in nature 
(including our own human nature), we believe 
that nature is what it is because of God; if we 
believe in God in spite of nature, we believe that 
nature is somehow in spite of God. In any case, 
the second-century theories of the relation between 
God and the world are of the greatest significance 
for their doctrine of God, and that is our present 
concern. 

What some moderns disparagingly call “‘fiat- 
creation,’ conceived after the manner of human 
handiwork, was the old non-philosophical view; it 
denotes God anthropomorphically. Ideas or 
forms impressing themselves upon dead, negative 
matter,—such was the Platonic view. In the late 
second century, two groups of men set forth at 
length distinctive and vivid accounts of the crea- 
tion: they were the Gnostics and the Apologists. 

To the Gnostics, creation was rather a catas- 
trophe. ‘The world is bad: perfection, Infinity, 
must be very far away from it. When we aspire 
to belief in God, we aspire very far indeed from 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 49 


present objective fact. God is believed in in spite 
of the world, and so the world is in spite of God. 
‘Endless genealogies” of beings derived from the 
Infinite, each generation lower than the preceding, 
are framed to bridge the awful gulf. But even 
with the help of all the emanations, the origin of 
the physical universe is not an emanation but a 
making, and a clumsy one at best. On this basis, 
there is no finding of God by analogy with nature; 
it appears rather to be a finding of God by a sharp 
rebound from nature; the via negationis most, 
then the via eminentiae, have validity: the via 
affirmationis has practically no place. God is in 
superlative degree what nature is not. The 
Church’s rejection of this world-view is one of 
the very few points in the doctrine of God which 
got into the Creed, in the phrase ‘Maker of 
heaven and earth.” 

The ‘“Logos-doctrine” was used and developed 
by the Apologists largely for the purpose of ac- 
counting for creation. The personified Reason or 
Word of God expressed himself in creation, and 
later in Incarnation. Nature, on this basis, is not 
so hopelessly alien to God that we can know noth- 
ing of him from it: nature reveals God, and the 
human nature of Christ supremely reveals him. 
Yet in thinking of a mediator for creation, these 
theologians were convinced that there is something 


50 GOD AND REALITY 


in God which is above his character as a workman, 
something eternal which transcends his creative- 
ness. The divine nature should not be thought of 
(they seem to say) as restless, all-dynamic energy 
alone—there should be room for quiet in Deity.° 
The three classical ways of formulating the idea 
of God, affirmative, negative, and superlative, are 
fairly balanced. 

The late second century, which was such a 
momentous time for all departments of Christian 
history, was eminent for this among other things, 
that it saw the essential achievement of a philo- 
sophical apprehension of the Christian religion, 
the widening of primitive and provincial ideas into 
the ideas of a world-religion, the synthesis of 
Jewish and Greek beliefs into Catholic theology. 
Henceforth for a long time the Christian idea of 
God would have a fairly stable content of mean- 
ing. God is the Original Reality of all existence, 
a spiritual Substance and a perfect moral Nature, 

5I cannot forget my first sight of the art of the school of 
Beuron, when it was being lavishly produced in the Benedictine 
mother-house at Monte Cassino. It was a brand-new art then, 
and it spoke a new emphasis in theology. ‘The figures look so 
very still; even the wings of the angels are still. It is Oriental, 
like Egypt or Assyria. “For God does not change,” said the 
Father in charge of the work. Now such a movement in reli- 
gious decoration seems to me highly significant of the way in 
which our doctrine of God does change, though God does not. 
All of a sudden there comes a startlingly new and startlingly 


ancient picture of God, right in the heart of the Benedictine 
Order, in the heart of Catholic Christianity. 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 51x 


shared perfectly by the Father, the Son, and the 
Holy Spirit, and in measure by Christians. He 
is the Ultimate, and the directly apprehended 
Object of religion, and the Spirit of religion itself. 
His nature is revealed by the created world, espe- 
cially the created humanity of Christ, wherein all 
excellencies, shorn of all limitation, raised to the 
superlative degree of perfection, may be attributed 
to the God who thought it, and in thinking it 
made it. 


IV 


The Christological controversies, which in- 
cluded by implication Trinitarian controversies, 
from the third to the fifth century, may be com- 
prehended for our present purpose as bearing on 
the relations between the one Deity and the divine 
Persons (as we now call them). The Deity is 
one essence, substance, or nature, individual in the 
sense of indivisible. Without being divided it 1s 
shared by the Father with the Son (and with the 
Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit is thought of at 
all). That is nothing new: the Christological 
ages saw rather the trying-out, in the most trench- 
ant controversial way, of ideas already Christian. 

Sabellianism (always the favorite heresy of 
Sunday-school teachers expounding the Trinity) 
held to the individual unity of God, who according 


ee) GOD AND REALITY 


to different temporary phases of his work in the 
world is called Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. 
But this simplification violates the Gospel experi- 
ence, in which Jesus and the Father have social 
religious relations as Person with Person. In 
rejecting it, the Church declared in effect that the 
divine substance is not simply personal, but social- 
personal, attributing to Deity that most precious 
thing in the Gospel, the relation of Christ to the 
Father. 

Adoptianism, refined into Arianism, was a chal- 
lenge to the Church to make straight and keep 
straight its use of the term “God.” To say that 
any creature could become divine was a loose use 
of the term. And the Church finally saw that 
if anyone is called a divine Person, his divinity 
must mean the same thing as the Father’s divinity: 
he must be of the same substance as the Father, 
for there is only one divine substance. 

So far as doctrine of God is concerned, Nesto- 
rianism tended to keep the pure otherness of the 
divine nature, at some expense to the union of it 
with humanity in Christ. Monophysitism I can- 
not see as anything else than a blurring of all 
essential distinctness of Deity. The much- 
anathematized ‘“‘two-natures doctrine,” like Nes- 
torianism, kept the idea of God pure—God as 
infinite, not limited by time and space, by psycho- 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 53 


logical process of knowing and willing—and cor- 
rected Nestorianism by recording, without ex- 
plaining it, the Christian faith that in Christ this 
nature was united with a true human nature which 
was limited by time and space and psychological 
process of knowing and willing. ‘The issue at 
bottom, I believe, was a tension between two of 
the fundamental ideas of God—God as Ultimate 
Reality of the universe, and God as a directly ap- 
prehended Object among other objects. The 
Chalcedonian doctrine is a refusal to drop the first 
in order to emphasize the second. 


V 


St. Augustine may be the greatest doctor of the 
Church, but if so it was because he was its great- 
est disciple. His ideas are not new, but he 
learned an unparalleled wealth of meaning in old 
ideas, and when he came to retell them to his 
world they came forth developed almost beyond 
recognition. He propagated Christian Platonism 
in the Latin world, leading his readers on from 
homely little tales of stolen fruit to the contempla- 
tion of the Ineffable, Infinite One. God transcend- 
ent is the Originator of this world through his 
Logos; the world in all its beauty and majesty 
points to its Ultimate Source. God is also perfect 


54 GOD AND REALITY 


goodness and beauty, summing up all values, which 
culminate in God as Love—the Trinity is ex- 
pressed in terms of love, Amans, Amatus, Amor. 
But what is most striking in St. Augustine’s atti- 
tude to God, I think, is that with the thought of 
the infinite transcendent perfection clear and vivid 
in his mind, he yet found God very near and inti- 
mate. His mysticism is (as they say nowadays) 
not so much a Christ-mysticism or a Spirit- 
mysticism, but emphatically a God-mysticism. 
Others might satisfy their intellect with the meta- 
physics of the Infinite, while all their religious 
feeling went out to Christ: with Augustine the 
‘metaphysical Absolute’ and the Object of re- 
ligion were identical. Others had said that God 
is love: Augustine said, ““My God, I love thee.” 
This is the man who taught the Western Church 
nearly all its theology; some of it was unlovely; 
but this one fundamental thing in his idea of God 
is enough to put his name very high among God’s 
elect. 

A little later than St. Augustine came a strange, 
solitary spirit, who gradually acquired an influ- 
ential position in theology—the Pseudo-Dionysius- 
the-Areopagite. He was a Neoplatonist to the 
core. God, he teaches, is transcendent, above even 
reason, mind, and essence; no determinate attri- 
butes can be predicated of him, for he is above 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 55 


them all. But he is the Ultimate Reality of all 
that is real and good in nature. Hence we may 
work out a system for learning what God is like: 
first state something positive, a good quality ex- 
perienced in nature; then deny it, because the 
Infinite is above it; then make the synthesis by 
afirming it superlatively. As one might say, (1) 
God is everywhere, (2) God is nowhere (because 
where is a finite space-word), and (3) God is 
supra-spatial. More systematically than before, 
this threefold way to analogical knowledge of God 
is set forth. But this is not the most precious 
knowledge we may have of him: still speaking 
neoplatonically, Dionysius points the way to mys- 
tical communion with God, by a forsaking of all 
sense and all reason and idea, in a state essentially 
like the neoplatonic ecstasy. In the main lines of 
this teaching of mystical union, not explicitly with 
Christ or the Holy Spirit, but with God tran- 
scendent, Dionysius is akin to St. Augustine. 

One other Dionysian idea runs through some 
of the medieval theological summa, that of God 
as absolute Goodness, with the quality of self- 
bestowal as essential to goodness—bonum dif- 
fusivum sui. This thought is not only applied to 
the relation of God to creatures, but used as the 
reason for the Trinitarian processions from the 


Father. 


56 GOD AND REALITY 
To Dionysius, then, God is the Ground of all 


existence, the Consummation of all Value, and the 
perfect satisfaction of the soul’s love for the Ob- 
ject of religion. 


VI 


In the Middle Ages, there were many saints 
who lived the mystical way, and there were some, 
among whom St. Francis stands supreme, who 
found God friendly and intimate in all natural and 
homely things, never questioning about transcend- 
ence or the universe. ‘There were also some who 
resolutely faced metaphysical issues, determined 
to show that Christianity is philosophically sound. 
In the present revival of interest in medieval 
theology, several rival claims to the title of most 
original thinker of the Middle Ages are urged— 
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, Duns Scotus, 
Roger Bacon, all have supporters. Certainly in 
the doctrine of God St. Anselm’s serene philoso- 
phizing on the ontological argument will be 
granted a secure place. It is an argument from 
an ideal to its necessary reality; and so far as this 
argument itself is concerned the primary definition 
of God is ideal Perfection—the idea of God is 
the idea of something than which nothing more 
perfect can be thought of. We might put it very 


DEVELOPVIEN Ty Ob Ww ETIE TDR AS om 


abruptly thus: the idea of the Supreme Ideal is. 
self-contradictory if the Supreme Ideal does not: 
exist; therefore the Supreme Ideal Exists. 

There was some originality; but for the most 
part, in regard to doctrine of God, the medieval 
theologians were systematizers, on a scale majestic 
in range—they were universal theologians, so far 
as they knew the universe—and microscopic in de- 
tail. Plato or Aristotle taught them their phi- 
losophy, St. Augustine their theology, and the 
communis opinio among themselves placed a check 
upon unrelieved originality of expression. Or- 
ganic unity of the whole system, and exact pre- 
cision of every item in it, were their aims. Of 
course they never satisfied themselves, but, taken 
all together, they did an amazingly fine piece of 
collective scholarship. 

The ancient ideas of God, as First Cause of the 
universe, First Mover, Necessary Being, De- 
signer, Perfect Goodness, as well as St. Anselm’s 
id quo maius cogitari non potest, are there, and 
they are really appreciated. The via affirmationis, 
via negationis, and via superlationis are made ex- 
plicit. The places of nature and reason, revelation 
and faith, in theology are analysed. The divine 
attributes are listed, questioned, and defined. Ac- 
cording to St. Thomas, for instance, God is 
simplex, spiritual, actus purus, sui generis, without 


58 GOD AND REALITY 


accidents, perfect, good, infinite, present in all 
things, immutable, eternal, one, living, willing, loy- 
ing, just, merciful, provident, predestinating, 
omnipotent, and blessed. The doctrine of the 
Trinity is recognized as supernaturally revealed, 
but it is then analysed with a minuteness that is 
exasperating to most moderns. ‘The rationale of 
the Trinitarian processus, the relations of the 
divine Persons as ultimately relations of timeless 
origin, the definition of divine Persons as Subsist- 
ent Relations, such questions as whether the 
Father is the Father because he begets, or begets 
because he is the Father, will serve to illustrate 
the matter. Of course we cannot go into any de- 
tail here, but the underlying conviction is clearly 
that God is rational, reason is reason wherever 
you find it, whether in God or in man, and reve- 
lation is not a silencer of reason but an encourage- 
ment to it to go as far as it can. Revelation gives 
data, and data call for science. 

The God of the metaphysicians, and of the 
mystics, and of the Franciscan “Little Brothers,” 
may not seem to be one God at all. But some of 
the metaphysicians were also mystics, and some 
were Franciscans: until this is realized, one does 
not perceive the richness of the medieval idea of 


God. 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 59 


VII 


With the modern period, the idea of God, which 
had been on the whole stable and secure from 
the third century, begins again to fluctuate. This 
is quite natural. If God stands in any relation 
to nature, any great change in the view of nature 
will, and ought to, be accompanied by change in 
the concept of God. And the modern world has 
witnessed most disconcerting changes in men’s 
view of nature. 

Great new one-man systems of universe-philoso- 
phy mark the new era, and there is an idea of God 
for every system. For Descartes God 1s the per- 
fect Substance, for Spinoza God is all Substance, 
for Leibnitz God is the supreme Monad in a unt- 
verse of monads. ‘Then the criticism of experi- 
ence, culminating in Kant, on the whole tended to 
a radical distrust of the ability of human reason 
to discover ultimate truth. The wide-reaching 
result has been either a general agnosticism in 
regard to God altogether, or a disposition to treat 
the idea of the Divine as a postulate of some sort, 
answering to some need other than that of absolute 
truth. 

Criticism of our faculties for knowing anything 
about things-in-themselves leads, of course, to ag- 


6D ei WW) DOAN ER aaa 


nosticism in regard to the Ultimate Reality of the 
universe. We cannot tell whether it has a First 
Cause or not, whether it is the work of a design- 
ing Mind or not. Later, the modern psychology 
has added its force to critical philosophy in de- 
throning human reason. Such critical agnosticism 
as this has been immeasurably furthered by the 
advance of natural science; the more we know of 
facts, the less certain we are of ultimate explana- 
tion of the facts. ‘The physical universe is so much 
greater and more intricate than we had thought, 
and the process of human reasoning is so much 
smaller and feebler than we had thought, that for 
the latter to understand the former seems quite 
too absurdly impossible. 

A certain distinction in terms is necessary in 
regard to the agnostic idea of God. It generally 
speaks in one of two ways: (1) it takes for 
granted the traditional idea of a personal, moral, 
anthropomorphic God, and doubts whether such 
a being exists; or (2) it defines God as the Ulti- 
mate Reality (or equivalent) and doubts what 
sort of being that is. In the latter case, agnostics 
generally have allowed some valid content to the 
idea of the Ground of Existence, as when Herbert 
Spencer speaks of the Unknowable Ultimate Real- 
ity as a Power present in all things, an infinite and 
eternal Energy, etc., and Matthew Arnold gives 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 61 


his famous formula, ‘‘an enduring Power, not our- 
selves, that makes for righteousness.” 

But from Kant onward, agnostics as to our in- 
tellectual apprehension of the Supreme Being have 
made some sort of compensation. Deity can not 
be known, but may have to be postulated. To 
Kant, God as perfect Moral Governor is a neces- 
sary postulate of our moral reason. This is not 
the universe-God, and not the religious God (Kant 
would have no mysticism): it is an austere idea, 
yet it can arouse a feeling of reverence, and is so 
far religious. ‘The God of religion or “faith’’ is 
often postulated by other agnostics, not of course, 
as the Ground of Existence, metaphysics being 
barred, but as an indispensable element in our 
equipment for life. Hence all the recent develop- 
ment of the value-God and the psychology-God. 

Most philosophically-minded people in the 
nineteenth century, however, found their faith suf- 
ficiently supported by idealism, which interprets 
the universe in terms of mind. That is quite an- 
cient. But a distinctive form of it is absolutism, 
systematized by Hegel and extensively popular- 
ized in the English-speaking world, so that it be- 
came the orthodox philosophy in the double sense 
that it was the dominant philosophy in the uni- 
versities and that it was supposed to justify ortho- 
dox theism. It includes the whole universe as the 


62 GOD AND ‘RHAEILY 


experience of the Absolute, in which all seeming 
contradictions disappear. But absolutists could 
not agree on the question of identifying God with 
the Absolute. 

The idea of God as the Absolute certainly pre- 
serves the divine universality: he is infinite, Ulti- 
mate Reality. But as the Absolute includes all 
things in his experience, he includes evil, or is be- 
yond good and evil, and the value of God as per- 
fect Goodness is at least obscured. Compensation 
is found in the thought that evil is only appearance, 
that when the returns are all in the whole experi- 
ence of the universe will be found altogether good, 
and (as it is sometimes popularly put) the whole 
universe is growing into perfect self-consciousness 
—God Is improving. 

Since the Absolute does not satisfy the demand 
that God shall be perfect Goodness and an imme- 
diate Object of religious experience, many absolu- 
tists (as well as others) refuse to identify God 
with the Absolute. The Absolute includes the 
good God of religion and other beings besides. 
God as Ultimate Reality is surrendered in order 
to keep the “God of religion,’ and we have the 
idea of the finite God. 

The finite God is more popular outside idealism 
than inside. Idealism has been assailed by an ag- 
gressive philosophical Bolshevism which denies the 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 63 


essential oneness of the universe. Pluralism al- 
lows for a vivid living God as one claimant among 
others, and this has all the value of God as good 
and definitely objective, the Invisible King or 
Great Comrade struggling along with us in the 
fight against really evil forces, though it waives 
any claim to an adequate guaranty of victory. 

One more historical movement deserves a mo- 
ment’s notice here. ‘The modern rise of the social 
spirit has already aftected the idea of God in some 
quarters. Comte’s religion of humanity has a way 
of recurring. The God of the social gospel, some 
say, must not be the “‘sultanic’’ God of tradition, 
with his trappings of royalty, his court, his unap- 
proachableness, above all his receiving of (spirit- 
ual as well as physical) acts, words, and attitudes 
of reverence. God must be democratized. But 
the most thorough-going effect of the social em- 
phasis upon the doctrine of God has appeared in 
the identification of God with the Social Spirit, 
“for all practical purposes.’”’ Analogies occur in 
school-spirit, the flag, Uncle Sam. Here again 
the values of the concept are the values of the 
finite God, a definitely real Object in experience, 
and something effectively good. The lack, 
whether regretted or not, is of the thought of God 
as Ultimate Reality. 

There has been perhaps too much about phi- 


64 GOD AND REALITY 


losophy-books in this historical sketch. ‘That 1s 
regrettable. But it must suffice to admit that a 
great part of the history of the idea of God went 
on in the minds of people who never read a 
philosophy-book, to say nothing of writing one. 
What was the theology of the people who simply, 
stolidly, went to church and said their prayers? 
That would be vastly worth knowing, but it is 
unknowable. We do enough reading of our own 
ideas into what people write: if they have not the 
defence of having written, we should do so even 
more. 

The present situation reminds us forcibly of a 
similar one in our past, when the traditional Jewish 
idea of God emerged into the Graeco-Roman 
world, and Christian thinkers devoted all that was 
in them to the effort to synthesize the different 
ideas of God into a firmly coherent yet adequately 
universal Christian doctrine. They succeeded 
measurably, for if there is any solidity and dura- 
bility in beliefs at all, the substance of the Chris- 
tian doctrine of God was comparatively solid and 
constant from the third century to the eighteenth. 
It had become the orthodox belief, and in the gen- 
eral liquefying of beliefs in the eighteenth century 
it occupied much the same position as the Jewish 
idea of God had in the second century. The new 
world of science and philosophy corresponds to 


DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA 65’ 


the Greek world upon which the Jewish-Christian 
religion projected itself. The need of a synthesis 
is even more urgent now than it was then, but 
there are few signs that it is near accomplishment. 

The difficulty, it seems to me, is due less to real 
contrariety of belief than to inability to use lan- 
guage with any steady constancy of meaning. It 
is the old problem of definitions, in an aggravated 
form. Do what we will, we cannot make a 
single language which will validly represent our 
thoughts: language at best is only roughly sym- 
bolic. But an aggravation of the trouble consists 
in this, that we are not really willing to make our 
language constant. We must needs be original; 
we must have a new way of putting things; we 
must have variety; every time we say a thing we 
feel we must say it in different words. The Babel 
will soon be quite intolerable. But our hope lies 
in the evidence of history that when a Babel be- 
comes too much for endurance, an Esperanto can 
be worked out with fair success, sufficient to last 
for awhile. 


CHAPTER III 
GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 


WHETHER God is anything else or not, in the 
minds of probably most people who use the name 
seriously God is a distinct Object of religion, ap- 
prehensible in some way, different from the envi- 
ronment, here rather than there, not everything 
in general but something in particular, not the All, 
but (in the James dialect) ‘“‘one of the eaches.” 
There is not always a denial of the universal as- 
pects, though sometimes there is, but often along 
with the universal there is a stubborn insistence 
on the particular: however he may stand to the 
universe, God is generally counted as a particular, 
an individual substance,’ a reality, and a proximate 
reality. This particularism of God may be only 


1 When Bishop Gore proclaims to all the winds of heaven that 
by “substance” the Church means no more and no less than “real 
thing” (The Holy Spirit and the Church, 233-4), he seems, if I 
may venture so to suggest, to be thinking of individual substance 
rather than what I have called simply substance in Chapter II. 
The difference may roughly be illustrated by the difference be- 
tween flesh (substance, real stuff) and a body (individual sub- 
stance, real thing), or between spirit (substance, real stuff, as it 
were) and @ spirit or a soul (individual substance, real thing). 


66 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 67 


formally allowed for, or it may be emphasized as 
the most worth while thing about God, or indeed 
it may be pushed to the extreme of exclusiveness, 
by a denial of the all-in-all aspect and a doctrine 
that God is finite. 

Early ideas of God are, apparently, always of 
this sort, always of a God. Children’s ideas are 
in this regard like primitive ideas. And even when 
there is some thought of universal powers, such 
as Fate, the outlines of a God are likely to remain 
clean-cut. Even when the universal powers them- 
selves are believed to be the ultimate Divine, there 
is a tendency to compensate by a growth of medi- 
ator-theology: when the later Judaism came to 
believe in God transcendent, it also came to believe 
in intermediaries, and was comparatively ready to 
believe in God-incarnate, Christ. The more uni- 
versal and ultimate Vishnu became, the more dear 
became Krishna his incarnation. From Robes- 
pierre’s worship of the Supreme Being in the open 
air, the French reacted strongly to the worship of 
Jesus present on the altar. 

Such a predominance of religious interest in the 
Proximate-Reality God as amounts to an ignoring 
of Ultimate Reality was seen in the mystery-relig- 
ions of Greco-Roman paganism. People were 
drawn to them not because they offered any solu- 
tion of the mystery of the universe, but because 


68 GOD AND REALITY 


they offered personal salvation by personal contact 
with a Lord. They give us the impression of 
being quite uncritical and unphilosophical. ‘They 
do not seem to have cared whether their Lords 
were or were not the Ground of all existence. But 
their Lords were to them personal, definitely real, 
and near at hand. Beyond a doubt, a large num- 
ber of gentiles came into the Christian Church out 
of religions of this sort, with this as their domi- 
nating thought of God, and with this longing for 
personal saving contact with a Lord as their mo- 
tive for coming. A priori, we could be almost 
certain that many of them never forsook this point 
of view, but accepted the Lord Christ as all the 
God that mattered, without troubling themselves 
with either “the God of the Jews” or the God of 
the universe. So clearly probable does this seem 
before the evidence comes in, that the great 
wonder is, on reading Dr. McGiffert’s thesis on 
this subject, that the positive evidence for it is 
so exceedingly slight. The evidence, of course, 
comes from the teachers, not the taught: if the 
rank and file had written their understanding of 
Christianity, ‘“‘the God of the early Christians”’ 
would probably have a different appearance. 
However this may be, it is plain enough that 
other periods in the Church’s life have manifested 
an all-sufficing interest in Christ as God the Proxi- 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 69 


mate Reality, and all the God that matters. I 
refer to the ardent emotional religion which makes 
“Jesus only” its object (not that the “only” is 
literally exclusive, but virtually so). Medieval 
Catholicism furnishes some examples, as does the 
Counter-Reformation; but the phase of it most 
familiar to us is English and American Evangel- 
icalism. Here the consciousness of salvation by 
the Blood of Jesus is the religious centre, and the 
religion is almost all centre. Of theism, the in- 
finity of God, the mysterium tremendum of holi- 
ness, there was no denial, but there was no great 
attention paid to them. Instead of the old brev- 
lary hymns such as ‘“‘O God, creation’s secret 
source, Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source,” 
the favorites were more like “What a friend we 
have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear!” 
When any problem of conduct came up, one was 
urged to say, ‘Lord Jesus, what do you want me 
to do?” This religion is not so completely lost 
to us that we cannot remember enough of the 
detail of it to feel its intensity and singleness of 
devotion. To its singleness of devotion to the 
Lord Jesus close at hand it owed its exceptionally 
high religious satisfaction. 

Catholicism has also been rich in the religion 
of Jesus as God-at-hand. A little boy, meeting 
a nun, asked her about her crucifix: ‘‘What’s 


70 GOD AND REALITY 


that?’ ‘That's God,” she told him. But, over 
and above the fact that the Incarnation itself gives 
just this God-with-us to Christianity, the Catholic 
religion has grown considerably in devotion to the 
personal, local, human presence of God in the 
Blessed Sacrament, All the theology that justifies 
it is of little appeal to ordinary men compared 
with the mere offer of access to God sacramentally 
present in the tabernacle; and all the authority 
against it is too feeble to prevent people from 
coming to Christ ‘‘where they can find him.” 
The Catholic religion, and Evangelicalism as well 
(not that these are mutually exclusive terms), has 
a great deal more thought of God than what is 
centred in Jesus present here and now, but to 
many Catholics the Christ in the Eucharist is al- 
most the only God that matters. One who has 
tried to teach theology to persons who on enter- 
ing the seminary have hardly any interest in God 
other than as he is in the Blessed Sacrament knows 
how religiously powerful that appeal is, and how 
novel and at first unwelcome is the direction of 
worship through the Sacrament, through the 
humanity of Christ, to God the Infinite Reality. 
I believe, though I cannot say from experience, 
that it is just as difficult for a pronounced Evan- 
gelical to find at first any religious interest in the 
Infinite. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 71 


Just so, say many modern persons, neither 
Catholic nor Evangelical; the God of immediate 
tangible experience is all the God that can have 
any interest for us. A God who effects something 
in our daily lives, who makes himself felt, is the 
only God that means anything. We must rein- 
terpret God as a being who lives, suffers, fights, 
heals, consoles, incites, calms, reforms, forgives— 
Immanuel is the only God that can meet modern 
conditions, the modern youth-spirit, the war-spirit, 
the social spirit, the scientific spirit, the industrial 
spirit. “Chere is so much of this that it would be 
pointless to quote. ‘The prophets of the new 
available God must know of the Evangelical de- 
votion to Jesus and the Catholic devotion to the 
Real Presence; if the need is of a God that you 
can take to people in a hospital, the Evangelical 
takes the “‘blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,” and 
the Catholic takes the Host; for one reason or 
another these are rejected by the advocates of 
the “new idea of God,” but it cannot be for any 
lack of the definiteness, nearness, in a sense finite- 
ness, in the Lord so offeredtomen. The proximate 
God is in fact nothing new; but there is an agitated 
urging of some new form of proximateness. 

The demand is not satisfied by a doctrine of 
divine immanence, though that does go in the di- 
rection of nearness to man, and in the days of 


72 GOD AND REALITY 


Browning and Tennyson many thought it would 
save the situation. ‘The trouble is that immanence 
goes beyond nearness to all-pervasiveness or even 
identification, and the result is that God seems to 
be everything in general and nothing in particular. 
What the modern cry for a new God means is 
generally not that at all, but decidedly something 
in particular, an Object among objects, one that is 
different from his environment and makes a dif- 
ference in his environment. It is not God imma- 
nent but God concomitant that people pray for 
now. 


II 


For an interpretation of God as primarily such 
a particular, proximate Reality there is weighty 
theoretical justification, according to various prin- 
ciples and philosophies. 

1. In the first place it is justified, if not as the 
primary, at least as an essential element in the 
concept of God, by the doctrine of the Incarnation 
(or any doctrine of incarnation). God is objec- 
tively and distinctively present in the human life 
of Jesus, so that God is accessible through his 
humanity. Some say, indeed, that God is “‘still, 
in any absolute sense, the Great Unknowable, ex- 
cept as we know him in his only begotten Son, 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 73 


Jesus Christ.” ? Such a statement is illustrative of 
an extreme (I think exaggerated) view. But the 
taking of Jesus as all the God we know, or all the 
God we need, is based on the essential Christian 
doctrine of the Incarnation. 

2. Again, as we saw above, Catholic sacra- 
mental doctrine is a doctrine of God objectively 
and efficaciously at hand in a certain mode of 
presence at some places and at some times. 

3. This is the favorite view of the psychology 
of religion. Naturally, if God comes into psy- 
chology at all, he is there as a sensation, a percept, 
or a concept, or some kind of mental experience. 
That is, the God of psychology is God present to 
the (finite) mind. And the general tendency of 
psychology of religion is to see the experience of 
God less as a drawing of inferences from nature 
in general than as a response to certain particular 
stimuli. For psychology, God is particular and 
proximate, whether objectively real or not; he is 
apprehended as an Object, different from the 
other environment. 

4. In some philosophies, God is conceived as 
finite. Hume suggested this, in his Dialogues con- 
cerning Natural Religion, as a new theory. 
‘But supposing the Author of Nature to be finitely 
perfect, though far exceeding mankind; a satis- 


2 The Living Church, June 6, 1925, p. 172. 


74 GOD AND REALITY 


factory account may then be given of natural and 
moral evil, and every untoward phenomenon be 
explained and adjusted . . . and in a word, be- 
nevolence, regulated by wisdom, and limited by 
necessity, may produce just such a world as the 
present.” J. S. Mill says, “It is not too much 
to say that every indication of design in the cosmos 
is so much evidence against the omnipotence of 
the designer. . . . Wisdom and contrivance are 
shown in overcoming difficulties, and there is no 
room for them in a Being for whom no difficulties 
exist. [he evidences therefore of Natural The- 
ology distinctly imply that the author of the cos- 
mos worked under limitations: that he was obliged 
to adapt himself to conditions independent of his 
will and to attain his ends by such arrangements 
as those conditions admitted of.” 3 

The Absolutism of F. H. Bradley and B. 
Bosanquet contains a view of God as finite. The 
Absolute is all-inclusive Reality, in which all con- 
tradictions are resolved, and which is accordingly 
infinite: but the Absolute is not God. God is 
taken to be the Object of religion, of a high grade 
of reality, but because he is (as matter of religious 
necessity) personal, and there are other persons 
than he, he is not all-inclusive and all-reconciling, 
and therefore he is an appearance of Reality, but 


8 Three Essays on Religion, 176-7. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 75 


not Ultimate Reality itself. So an idealistic mon- 
ism does not always find its principle of unity in 
God—or does not give the name of God to that 
principle of unity. 

Pluralism more naturally doubts the infinity of 
any, even the highest, of the plural entities that 
make up the universe. According to this there is 
no Absolute to reconcile the quarrelling factions, 
but they remain unreconciled. God is one power 
among others. Everybody knows how William 
James devoted his genius for vividly colored ex- 
pression of philosophical theory to the crusade 
against the Absolute, and the rallying of the fight- 
ing strength of “great-hearted gentlemen’’ to the 
cause of the finite God—-yes, it does remind us of 
the cavalier ballad, ““God and King Charles.”’ On 
the whole, he was not reluctantly giving up the 
divine Infinity: he was glad that God was finite, 
that there was a real fight going on, with a chance 
to lose and a chance to win. The present genera- 
tion is but little less aware of H. G. Wells, who 
carries on the same general propaganda with great 
popularizing skill: the ultimate reality for him is 
a Veiled Being (so there may be an Absolute), 
but God the Invisible King is the great power of 
all goodness—great but limited, fighting against 
powerful enemies. Other forms of pluralism have 
more confidence in the ultimate harmony of the 


76 GOD AND REALITY 


universe; Howison and McTaggart think of the 
universe as a society of monads, spirits, individ- 
uals, or persons, of which God is the chief but not 
the all-inclusive, perhaps not the sole original, one: 
God is finite because he is limited by the other 
spirits, even if he. originated them, and even if 
there is an essential harmony among them all. 

5. A similar and likewise fashionable re-defining 
of God arises from the social gospel. We need, it is 
said, a new idea of God as the personified social 
spirit. The moral urgency of this propaganda 
leads it into a quasi-oratorical style, in which pre- 
cision of definition and all-round fairness of spirit 
is hardly to be expected. A typical expression of 
this plea for the social God is this—‘‘The deistic 
conception of an age now completely past, that 
God is some distant monarch, will fade into the 
darkness with the social system which gave it rise; 
and society as a federal union, in which each indi- 
vidual and every form of human association, shall 
find free and full scope for more abundant life, 
will be the large figure from which is projected the 
conception of God in whom we live and move and 
have our being.”’ * 

Again—“TIt is accordingly this ‘large figure’ not 
simply of human but of cosmic society which is to 

4R. A. Woods, Democracy a New Unfolding of Human Power, 


in Studies in Philosophy and Psychology by former students of 
Charles Edward Garman, p. 98. 


GOD APPROX TVET PORBADCTTY (379 


yield our God of the future. It is the figure of 
myriad lives, and yet of one vast group life, in 
ceaseless activity. here is no place in the figure 
for an eternally perfect being, and no need; no 
need, for the vast society by its own inherent mass- 
dialectic—of struggle and adaptation, co-operation 
and conflict—is working out its own destiny; no 
place, for the society, democratic from end to end, 
can brook no such class distinction as that between 
a supreme being favored with eternal and absolute 
perfection and the mass of beings doomed to the 
lower ways of imperfect struggle. It is the large 
figure out of which is projected the conception of 
God that is ourselves, in whom and of whom we 
literally are; the God that, in every act and inten- 
tion, we, with all our countless fellows, are realiz- 
ing. Nor indeed is it a God, as idealistic abso- 
lutists would have it, in whom our imperfect 
actions vanish in perfection, but one in whom they 
are the means whereby out of an imperfect pres- 
ent, a less imperfect future is wrought. It is a 
God that in one respect is in the making, growing 
with the growth of the world; suffering and sinning 
and conquering with it: a God, in short, that is the 
world in the unity of its mass-life . .. a God 
growing with the world.” °® 


5H, A. Overstreet, The Democratic Conception of God, in 
Hibbert Journal, January, 1913. 


78 GOD AND REALITY 


“Every constructive, fruitful organization of 
people is a means of understanding the divine. It 
is not accident that we think of great social entities 
as great personalities. Our college is our Virgin 
Mother, to whom we address songs and sentiments 
of genuine affection. Our city has a personality, 
photographed and visualized, whenever her honor 
or her ambition is challenged. Each state has an 
individuality and every nation is personified 
through a definite face and figure. Is it not just as 
natural to sum up the meaning of the whole of life 
in the person and image of God? . . . God 1s the 
great Ideal Companion. ‘To commune with him is 
to gain new appreciations of all that he signifies to 
us. He is then identified with Strength and Wis- 
dom and Nobility. ‘To be loyal to him is to strive 
to adhere to all that he means to us. . . . Over 
and above the particular persons constituting one’s 
class or country or world is the feeling of the entity 
of the class or country or world itself. Each class 
in a school possesses an individuality to which the 
members manifest loyalty and reverence. ‘That 
individuality has a certain objectivity and per- 
manence above and beyond any particular persons 
within it. Ina sense it transcends them. Yet that 
individuality obviously is in and through them. If 
this be the nature of God as the Ideal Socius, then 
he too has at least such reality and objectivity. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 79 


He is the Soul of the world in which all other 
selves live and move and have their being.” ° 

Germany of the present day is producing a 
philosophy called Phenomenology, which has 
marked affinity with other empiricisms that dis- 
count pure syllogistic logic and metaphysics as a 
way of getting at the truth. Its central position 
may be baldly summarized thus—We get sense- 
impressions of single objects; this 1s the “empirical 
phenomenon.” ‘This we “reduce” to a “pure phe- 
nomenon” in contemplation of it, bracketing or 
peeling off (as one might peel off layer after layer 
of an onion) all that is merely individual in it as a 
single fact of experience; in this phaenomeno- 
logische Reduktion we arrive at the inner essence 
of the thing, which we thus behold—it is not a 
matter of logical inference. 

This phenomenology is built into a philosophy 
of religion by Adam, Winkler, Grtndler, and 
others, but with greatest persuasiveness by Max 
Scheler.* Allowing for variations in both thought 
and terminology, we find a general insistence that 
we must start with the factual, empirical phenom- 
ena of religious experience, apply to them the 
“phenomenological reduction,” and thus “imme- 
diately behold” the essence of religion. Religion 


6E, S. Ames, The New Orthodoxy, 50-3. 
7Vom Ewigen im Menschen, Leipzig, 1921. 


80 GOD AND REALITY 


is thus seen to be the holding of communion with a 
Being who is ens a se and holy (in Otto’s sense— 
Otto is highly regarded). By examining prayer 
we find the Object of prayer; this is a matter of 
Wesenschau, not logical argument.® 

It is not, I think, a false abstraction to see in all 
these theories, which are so utterly at variance on 
other questions, an agreement upon one thing, 
namely that whatever else the term “God” may 
imply, it must signify as the core of its meaning a 
particular, near-at-hand Object, a Proximate Re- 
ality. God is definitely a powerful stone, or a holy 
tree, or a spirit in a stone or tree, or a tribal deity, 
or Zeus, or Mithra, or Kyrios Christos, or Jesus 
Mighty to Save, or Jesus Present on the Altar, or 
a good worker with an intractable material, or an 
Appearance of the Absolute, or a Monad among 
monads, or the finite Invisible King, or the Social 
Spirit, or the Pure Phenomenon of religion. 
Truly this is a theological jangle, but all these 
Gods at any rate are something particular, not ab- 
stractions or infinites. [hey represent God as 
objectively experienced. 

One has been strongly tempted to put mysticism 


8 So far, I have had access only to Scheler’s book and to one 
by Dr. Joseph Geyser, Augustin und die phdnomenologische 
Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart (Miinster in Westfalen, 
1923), which contains ample quotations from the various writers 
of this school, as well as criticism. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 81 


unreservedly into the list of these ways of regard- 
ing God primarily as a Proximate Reality. Ina 
sense, mysticism has no history, for it is semper 
eadem, if ever anything was. And it timelessly 
utters its unanimous voice in claiming that God 
comes into known, unmistakable communion with 
the souls of men. It witnesses to God and his 
accessibility with the utmost positiveness; but of 
what God is like it can hardly bear witness at all. 
Mystics seem to see God as living, spiritual, real, 
but more than these, and so much more that these 
terms are absurdly inadequate to give any idea of 
Deity. Holiness, transcendent otherness, illimitable 
greatness, come to the mystics as positive matter 
of direct experience. They do not reason along 
the via negationis, they experience it. Mysticism is 
the religion of the Infinite in union with the finite. 
It is thus immensely important, if true, as a synthe- 
sis between the idea of God present to men and of 
God utterly beyond all the predicates of perfection 
that men can think of. If God infinite, immense, 
inscrutable, eternal, is really beyond the reach and 
interest of men, as some assert, that can only be 
because mysticism is utterly false. We must come 
back to this later. 


82 GOD AND REALITY 


Til 


Direct religious experience of God in close and 
particular relation to men is accounted as one of 
the ways in which qualities of the divine nature are 
apprehended. It is the inductive method spoken 
of in the first lecture; within the inductive method 
it is the via affirmationis or causalitatis that is 
foremost; and within the via affirmationis revela- 
tion, or what seems to be special, unusually height- 
ened, supernaturally caused, manifestation of God. 
It is our purpose now to attempt some statement 
of the divine attributes so ascertained. It will not 
improbably appear a grotesque thing to jump from 
a more or less history-of-religion standpoint to 
that of a stiff and rigid systematic theology. It 
will certainly be difficult, because those who have 
written in the manner of either one have seldom 
bothered to get on speaking terms with the other. 
But it is absurd for us to go on studying them as if 
they were absolutely unrelated. ‘The study of re- 
ligious history gives conclusions which if true are 
important for dogmatic theology, and ought to be 
stated as systematically as can be done. And dog- 
matic theology reckons, as we have seen, on posi- 
tive religious experience as one of the great ways 
of ascertaining the divine attributes. ‘Tentatively, 
then, let us define the content of the idea of God 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 83 


as it is formed by this via affirmationis. What are 
the attributes of God conceived as a special Object 
of religion, as a Proximate Reality? 

1. God is living. Such an idea runs straight 
through this whole line of thought about God. A 
stone that was worshipped was thought to have 
life in it; a living God is Jahweh of the Prophets, 
the Immortal Gods of the pagans, the risen and 
glorified Christ of the Church, the finite God of 
Mill, James, and Wells, the democratic God of the 
religious socialists. But what does living mean? 
The term is certainly a use of the biological anal- 
ogy, and means a characteristic at least like that of 
creatures which continuously adapt the environ- 
ment to themselves and themselves to the environ- 
ment. For the present point of view this may 
stand, though it calls for correction from other 
points of view: God as Ultimate Reality is not 
limited by the living conditions of an ordinary bio- 
logical specimen (via negationis ) ; he is perfection 
of life (via superlationis), eternal, pure dynamic, 
actus purus. God as Proximate Reality, however, 
is in the main thought of positively, as living, with 
a life comparable to ours, only more vital. 

2. God is spirit. Spirit generally means incor- 
poreal living substance. If we take into account 
the naive quasi-materialism of some earlier phases 
of religious belief, and the sophisticated quasi- 


84 GOD AND REALITY 


materialism of the Stoics and Tertullian, we must 
say that “‘incorporeal’’ may mean only relatively 
incorporeal. Such is God as Proximate Reality: 
he lives, but without being perceived by the senses; 
he is something like our minds, ‘‘a MORE of the 
same quality’ as the higher part of us, “the sub- 
conscious continuation of our conscious life,” as 
William James puts it, from the point of view 
strictly of the psychology of religion.® Other 
aspects, again, will supplement this (if they are 
accepted), and spirit may come to mean the “pure 
form” of the Aristotelians, or Absolute Conscious- 
ness, or something of the sort. 

3:),God1s'\powertul, | “Phe lite: or Goduaias 
above) adapts the environment to himself more 
than he adapts himself to the environment. From 
the earliest to the latest stages, the power of God 
has been at the core of the idea. Command of 
physical force, of course, is the more obvious 
meaning. As religion grows more refined, analo- 
gies to physical force are more used, such as the 
natural attractiveness of God as summum bonum 
(Aristotle), and the power of love (New Testa- 
ment and moderns). Also mere superiority of 
power fails to satisfy when the via superlationis is 
taken: it becomes omnipotence. | 


® Varieties of Religious Experience, 508-19. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 85 


4. God is holy. Holy means set apart, and a 
holy being is one that is purely and thoroughly 
himself, not corrupted by or confused with any- 
thing else. God in religious experience appears as 
‘wholly other’ than his beholder, so wholly other 
that rationality is bafded, and the Mysterium T're- 
mendum is contemplated with awe—"holy fear.” 
It would be too much to say that this attribute is 
characteristic of the idea of God as Proximate 
Reality in all its manifestations: it is notably 
absent from the Social Spirit and the limited Cre- 
ator, and is not very apparent in Evangelicalism. 
Perhaps this is because that ‘“‘otherness” seems to 
contradict the idea of nearness-at-hand, and there- 
fore is rationalized away from the idea of the 
Divine (even if the awe is experienced) by those to 
whom any aloofness or transcendence is unwel- 
come; and there are some to whom anything awe- 
ful is of the Evil One. I suppose that virtually 
everyone experiences awe-fulness more or less: it 
is real, first-hand experience. Some are ready and 
quick to accept it as related to the Divine. But 
others, especially since the so-called Enlighten- 
ment, refuse to call it holy and do their utmost 
(with considerable success) to suppress all the 
trembling awe with which we naturally regard it. 
The Divine must be ‘sweetness and light,” they 
think; God must dwell in a cosy, homelike, cheer- 


86 GOD AND. REALITY 


ful atmosphere. It is perfectly easy to see the 
danger there is in taking everything uncanny and 
“spooky” as a revelation of God; it is not so easy 
for moderns to see the danger there is in a denial 
of awful mystery in God and a refusal of holy fear 
in his presence. A rough-and-ready test of indi- 
viduals on this question may be made by asking 
what kind of hymns, music, and architecture they 
consider most truly religious. 

‘Wholly other,” and yet “More of the same”’! 
Here again we can see the antithesis of likeness 
and unlikeness between God and ourselves, each 
being a datum of religious experience. It seems 
near enough to a contradiction, indeed; but it is 
only another illustration of the affirmatio and the 
negatio by which theology rationalizes that experi- 
ence. 

When accepted as a true affirmatio, but cor- 
rected by the negative and superlative ways, the 
holiness of God is seen as the infinite purity of the 
divine essence and its infinite difference from every- 
thing creaturely as such. 

5. God is will. Will means action according to 
idea or purpose. Conceivably there might be life, 
power, spirit, without purposive idea; but in reli- 
gious experience, God is revealed as one who di- 
rects his life by “final causes.”’ The via negationis 
will remove effort and all conative limitations from 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 87 


the idea of divine will; the Proximate God, how- 
ever, is generally one who strives. 

6. God is compassionate. When creatures suf- 
fer, God shares in their experience. A tribal God 
was believed to share the fortunes of his people: 
their defeats were his defeats. Where suffering 
is not all referred to God as its cause, but is ac- 
counted evil, it is something contrary to the will of 
God; in the sense that God knows some things that 
are against his will, God suffers; in the sense that 
God knows our suffering, and knows it as contrary 
to him, God suffers. There is nothing new in this, 
but those who are most insurgent for a “‘new idea 
of God”’ make great demand for it. Divine passi- 
bility was recognized in polytheism and in the reli- 
gion of Jahweh. ‘The Jews themselves suffered 
terribly; they found some consolation in the 
thought that God was intimately concerned in their 
sufferings; but with characteristic virility they 
found more comfort in the power, the transcend- 
ence, the eventual triumph of God. Later Juda- 
ism magnified the divine transcendence. Philo- 
sophic paganism, as in Plato, Aristotle, and espe- 
cially the Epicureans, declared the divine nature 
impassible (via negativa). Not so the mystery- 
religions, in which the suffering Lord is prominent. 

When to our Lord were attributed the values 
of God, so that his human life was taken as God’s 


88 GOD AND REALITY 


human life, his sufferings were God’s human suf- 
ferings, no matter how impassible the divine na- 
ture is. And on the basis of the Hypostatic Union 
of the two natures in one Christ, it can be said that 
Christ suffered, and Christ is God, therefore God 
suffered. It is not Monophysite or Patripassian 
to say, ‘“Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and im- 
mortal, crucified for us, have mercy upon us.”’ 
One remembers sundry tales told by students re- 
turning from canonical examinations: the question 
had been asked, “Did Almighty God die on the 
cross?’ and most answered ‘‘Yes,’’ but sometimes 
one burst forth, “Most assuredly not!” And 
sometimes, whichever the answer was, there was 
divergence among the examiners as to whether it 
was heresy or not. What ought to be clear is 
that Christ’s human suffering does not nullify his 
divine impassibility. 

But if the divine Being united to himself a 
human nature, there must be some moral congeni- 
ality between the divine nature and the human. 
And if the Incarnation was an act of God, God is 
ihe sort of being who would put himself into a 
position where he would experience human suffer- 
ing; God is in his own divine nature an undergoer 
of humiliation for the redemption of men; it is of 
the divine nature to undergo human suffering and 
death for love of men. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 89 


It is true that the doctrine of the divine impassi- 
bility has at times been so exalted as to obscure the 
divine compassion. We must try later to see why 
it should be exalted at all. But in this generation 
(compare the ‘‘Foundations’’ movement, for in- 
stance) it is felt that we need a God who suffers 
with us, and for us, and by our acts. And I think 
theology can safely define that inasmuch as God 
knows human experience of suffering, which occurs 
sometimes contrary (though only in a relative 
sense contrary) to his will for human good, and 
inasmuch as he voluntarily took a passible human 
nature into union with himself, God suffers. The 
via negalionis must be reserved until later. 

7. God is love. Love means desire and will to 
share one’s life with other persons. This attribute 
does not appear universally in the idea of God as 
Proximate Reality. It is thought of much later 
than power. But it is important in the Prophets, 
in our Lord, St. Paul, St. John, St. Augustine, and 
most moderns. It has been obscured at times by 
men’s thought of the fighting force, or the en- 
gineering skill, or the transcendent blessedness, of 
God; it has been said that while theology has care- 
fully maintained it, the Christian imagination has 
often left it out of the idea of Divinity as such— 
Christ loves, but the Deity does not: ‘‘Men still 
spoke of the love of God: they only really meant 


90 GOD AND REALITY 


it when they thought of God the Son; clemency at 
most—a royal prerogative—was imagined of the 
Father.” *° The pendulum has swung so far in the 
other direction lately that there is a real danger of 
softening the idea of God down to mere effusive 
amiability, and thereby disgusting many whom it 
is desired to win (students get tired of “‘all this 
love-stuff”’) ; and we can welcome the wholesome 
genuineness of Bishop Gore’s avowal that the love 
of God has to him always been particularly difficult 
to believe in,** and Dr. Percy Gardner’s protest 
that ““Men have come to think of God as a weak 
and indulgent parent, who will not be hard on them 
in any case, who will think more of their happiness 
than of their perfection, and give them the things 
which they want or think they want. This way of 
regarding God had spread widely ten years ago, 
and veneration was drowned in a flood of sickly 
talk about the divine love. ... The ordinary 
Christian teaching about God needs infinite stiffen- 
ing.’ ** But again the via negationis must be held 
open. 

8. God is present. This means that there is no 
space-interval between him and anything or any 
person whatsoever. ‘The via negationis ascertains 

10B, H. Streeter, The Suffering of God, in Hibbert Journal, 
April, r9r4. 


11 Belief in God, xi. 
12 Practical Basis of Christian Belief, 135-6. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 91 


this by denying all limitations of space to the In- 
finite ; but we are specially concerned in this lecture 
with God as proximate to human experience, and 
human experience discovers (or thinks it dis- 
covers) and values special modes of the divine 
presence. There was the material presence of 
Christ’s humanity on earth; God is present every- 
where, but besides his omnipresence he was spe- 
cially, humanly, present also in Capernaum, or 
Jerusalem, or some other definite locality. “There 
is the Eucharistic or Real Presence, an extension 
of that same human presence of God to this altar 
or that, not itself the same thing as omnipresence 
but a special mode over and above that. ‘There is 
the indwelling presence of God which is the econ- 
omy of the Holy Spirit. And there is the attentive 
presence of God whenever we pray. A great deal 
of the demand for, and the finding of, a particular 
God in a particular place, as it were, a God who 
stands out as a distinct Object looming up out of 
the environment—a very general if not universal 
mode of religious experience—is harmonized with 
the Ultimate-reality God by some such rationaliz- 
ing as this: the special God here and now is recog- 
nized as a special mode of presence of the one 
ultimate God. Religion appears to me to be quite 
dependent on belief in some special mode of the 
divine presence, at least the attentive presence; 


92 GOD AND REALITY 


and I feel sure that it is no less vital to know what 
the divine absence—moral absence—means. 

Now it cannot be claimed that this bald list of 
attributes exhausts or coincides with the characters 
of the divine Being as all those have conceived of 
him who have found him particularly a Proximate 
Reality. But if the chief elements of this idea of 
the Divine have been included without any quite 
fatal omission, it will be seen that these chief ele- 
ments are all of them included in the doctrine of 
God as it may be found in any reputable treatise 
of dogmatic theology. ‘They are not generally ar- 
ranged as above, not generally put together as a 
class of attributes belonging to God as a present 
Real Object, or anything of the sort. They are 
traditionally arranged as quiescent, or active, or 
moral, for instance. But they certainly are not 
new attributes: they certainly do not make up a 
“new idea of God.” The only novelty that I can 
see in the new idea of God is the greater emphasis 
it lays upon certain of the traditionally recognized 
attributes, notably the divine compassion, and a 
corresponding belittling of others, sometimes a 


denial of others. But that is a great novelty, after 
all. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 93 


IV 


If now the concept to which this lecture is de- 
voted, the age-long developing concept of God as 
something-in-particular rather than All-in-all, as a 
distinct Object near at hand to our experience, 
rather than the Ultimate Ground of All Things, is 
sufficiently identifiable, we may venture to suggest 
some aspects of it which rightly give it a claim to 
our acceptance, and other aspects in which it fails 
to commend itself as a satisfying idea of God. 

1. For one thing, it recognizes differences. We 
can make grand, sweeping, universal statements, 
like ‘‘all is spirit,” “all that comes comes from God,” 
‘whatever is harmonious to thee, O Universe, is 
harmonious to me,” and thus throw a sort of 
glamour over the totality of things. That is of great 
significance; but it often appears to be the most 
tormal and futile of abstractions. ‘The difference 
between “all is God” and “there is no God”’ seems 
to be merely a sentimental difference in the way of 
viewing the same old world, merely a question 
whether you look at it with rose-colored or smoked 
glasses. To say “all is God” is too much like say- 
ing that God is not to be found at all; it reminds 
us of the evil of “being good” in our general ‘‘atti- 
tude” without doing anything good in particular. 


94 GOD AND REALITY 


So we revolt from the universal abstraction, and 
take our stand on the judgment that some things 
are superior to others. We waive the exalted 
claim to be in every moment of our life a part of 
God’s universal experience, and stand stiffly to the 
smaller claim that sometimes, here and there, now 
and then, we have had great experiences, which 
stand out from the every-day life—golden days, 
red-letter days, of saving contact with Something 
greater than ourselves. Even if “‘all is divine,” we 
are inclined to say that some things are a good 
deal more divine than others. Surely the Proxi- 
mate-reality idea of God is sound and reasonable 
in relying on the differences between things, some 
being exceptionally superior to the rest. 

2. It has also the religious value that comes 
from singling out God as different from the en- 
vironment. If all times and places are equally 
sacred, nothing is sacred, according to the inevi- 
table drift of human practice. Religion goes bet- 
ter with a God who has special sanctuaries and 
holy days, special trysting-places, than with a God 
who is merely everywhere. 

3. A “particular’’ God has also a moral value, 
if he is thoroughly partisan in favor of right and 
against wrong. To cooperate with him in the 


18 A student once remarked, after an extremely monistic lec- 
ture, “Well, if it’s all one, what’s the difference?” 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 95 


moral struggle is thus full of real meaning, where 
the thought of a God who somehow includes or 
transcends right and wrong tends to paralyse 
moral fibre. Here is the great strength of the 
finite-God idea, as everybody knows. It not only 
recognizes difference: it makes a difference. 

4. It is realistic. It finds God objective. Fr. 
Herbert Kelly has this to say for crass heathenism, 
that its idols may be hideous, loathsome things, but 
at any rate they are not the worshipper himself; 
the idol is that over there, it cannot be mistaken 
for himself; that uttermost degree of hideous 
loathsomeness, worship of self, is not there.’ 
Likewise the realistic God-in-the-universe, however 
low in the scale of finite being, at least has the 
merit of not being oneself. The essential idolatry 
is making to thyself a graven image: the ultimate 
idolatry is self-worship. If anyone comes to be- 
lieve that what he has been sincerely worshipping 
is merely the creation of his sentiment, the projec- 
tion of himself, his worship withers away. So long 
as the Object of his religion is really an Object, 
there is some salvation in it. 

5. A Proximate-reality God is socially present 
to men. He is companionable. This is of very 
high value. Social personality, social relations, 
are the most valuable things we have, and to find 


14 The Church and Religious Unity, 117. 


96 GOD AND REALITY 


our God in the sphere of the best of our human 
experience is good religion. 

6. A God thus objective and near at hand makes 
for a vivid, stirring, live theology. 

‘“Fargus amazed Sabre by telling him, without 
trace of self-consciousness and equally without 
trace of religious mania, that he was waiting, daily, 
for God to call upon him to fulfil the purpose for 
which he was placed there. He expected it as one 
expects a letter by the post. . . . ‘I believe you're 
asked ‘‘Ready?” and I want to say, whatever it is, 
Wye IReadyaies 

““Mysterious and awful suggestion, Sabre 
thought. ‘To believe yourself at any moment to be 
touched as by a finger and asked ‘Ready?’ ‘Aye, 
Ready.’ 

‘Mysterious and awful intimacy with God!” 

These values of the theology of the Proximate 
God are, at least most of them, favorite values 
among the earnest-minded of these days. It is not 
necessary to plead for them: it is enough to men- 
tion them, and to claim them as an integral part of 
the idea of God regularly held among Christians. 
One must acknowledge that there has been some 
dimming of this great and valid aspect of Divinity, 
and so far as this is so we are in need of a “‘new 
idea of God.” But I cannot see that there ever 


15 Hutchinson, If Winter Comes, 68. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 97 


was an age in which the leading interpreters of 
Divinity were “theologians to whom his supreme 
quality is his aloofness and unlikeness to men, who 
are satisfied if he is so far away that even his very 
existence may be dispensed with and neither the 
virtue nor the happiness of men be seriously af- 
fected thereby.” *® What is called for is essen- 
tially a restoration of some very ancient characters 
in men’s idea of God. It is a marvel how much 
we have changed in knowledge of the physical uni- 
verse, of the human mind, of history, and yet how 
capacious the ancient philosophies are of the new 
knowledge. The fact that Platonism, for ex- 
ample, is not burst to atoms by the new science is 
a marvellous fact. And likewise in theology: we 
keep thinking that with all the new knowledge of 
nature the idea of God must surely be revolution- 
ized; we begin to say a great deal about value, and 
dynamic, and democracy, and then we find that 
beneath the new words and the new deeds and the 
new facts, the great things that we want God to 
mean for us now are substantially what he has 
meant all along. The Leit-motif of the objective 
nearness of God the available Object of religion 
has sometimes sunk to a pianissimo, but it was 
sounded in the overture, and it has never gone 
quite out of the piece. 


16 Beckwith, Idea of God, 31. 


98 GOD AND REALITY 


Vv 


The human race has never outgrown its juvenile 
habit of expecting a God to stand out from the rest 
of the scene. ‘“‘O somewhere, somewhere, God 
unknown, exist and be!’ ** A great deal of experi- 
ence has justified the expectation and turned it into 
a more or less steady belief that God is a Reality 
that comes into human ken specifically as a distinct 
Object. Christianity is committed to this belief. 
As a positive position we have no wish to outgrow 
it, for our religion could not exist without it. But 
when it is buttressed by walls which shut out any 
different view of Deity, and especially when it is 
impatient of the compensating and correcting ideas 
that come from other directions, it is open to seri- 
ous criticism. 

1. A religion which takes “Jesus only’’ as its 
complete and total idea of God is unreliable. Be- 
lieving that “in him dwelt all the fulness of the 
Godhead bodily,” and that in the Word-made-flesh 
we behold the glory of God, we Christians are 
nevertheless not justified, I think, in saying that we 
can have no knowledge of God other than our 
knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. This over- 
development of Ritschlianism has become popular 
among devout and loyal Christians, so that it is 


17F, W. H. Myers, A Last Appeal. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY g9 


sometimes put quite casually, as if it were a matter 
of course to believe that way. I need not take it 
upon myself to invent new reasons against it. Pro- 
PessO RACE A MOCCR WILD SAYS iii cr tney "are 
doomed to disappointment who expect that Christ 
can permanently take the place formerly occupied 
by God in religion—the theologians having re- 
moved God to an inaccessible distance from men. 
. . . Christ can by no utmost stretch of reason 
or of faith take the ultimate place of God.” * A 
very intense Christian student once told me, with 
much diffidence but utter frankness, that “‘we get 
too much about Jesus and not enough about God.” 
We need not cite those who, like Mr. H. G. Wells, 
do not like our Lord. Bishop William Temple, in 
his thoroughly ‘“‘Christocentric’”’ book Christ the 
Truth, says, ““The conceptions of God and Man 
derived from elsewhere—from ordinary experi- 
ence, from human religion, from pre-Christian 
revelation—are not merely false or irrelevant,” 
and adds in a foot-note, “In Foundations, pp. 213, 
214, I wrote so as unwittingly to suggest that they 
are, yA Bj. Rawlinson says; Unless) the 
paradox be maintained that there is no knowledge 
of God anywhere, apart from Christianity, other 
media of Revelation must be recognized than that 


18 The Idea of God, 31. 
19 Pp, 149-50. 


100 GOD AND REALITY 


of the Gospel’; ”° and Baron von Hiigel, ‘The 
Christian doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus . . . is 
undoubtedly true and deeply enriching. Yet it can 
be wisely maintained by us only if we simultane- 
ously remember that, however truly God revealed 
Himself with supreme fulness and in a unique man- 
ner in Jesus Christ, yet that this same God had not 
left Himself, still does not leave Himself, without 
some witness to Himself throughout the ages be- 
fore Christ, and throughout the countries, groups, 
and even individual souls, whom the message, the 
fact, of the historic Jesus has never yet reached, 
or who, in sheer good faith, cannot understand, 
cannot see Him as He really is. The Unincarnate 
God has thus a wider range, though a less deep 
message, than the Incarnate God; and these two 
Gods are but one and the same God.” ™ 

We may, thus fortified, sum up our reasons for 
holding the religion of “Jesus only” (which 
Sabatier calls Jesusolatry) to be insufficient. (1) 
Unless there is some sort of independent standard 
of what a divine being should be, it is nonsense to 
call our Lord divine. (2) The very earliest of the 
strong advocates for his divinity, as Paul, John, 
and the author of Hebrews, recognized other 
knowledge of God than that derived from the Gos- 


20 Authority and Freedom, 115. 
21 Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, 134-5. 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 1o1 


pel, and obviously when they spoke of God meant 
more than ‘‘Jesus only.” (3) Christianity did not 
become relatively a world-religion, and it seems 
could not and never can become a world-religion, 
without some recognition and incorporation of 
other religions in the world. (4) It is only just 
and fair to admit that the same reasons we have 
for accepting our Lord as the supreme revelation 
of God are valid for some other religions as in 
some degree true. 

After all, this is in effect merely saying that we 
cannot be content with a God. We cannot accept 
any one being, even our Lord, as God without 
eventually asking “But what about the others?” 
The particular God cannot be true, in other words, 
unless he is true in comparison with everything else 
in the universe; and thus we must ask for the uni- 
versal God, the Ultimate One. But the persistence 
with which religion pushes its way through all par- 
ticularisms to a Universal is a large subject, and 
it is only mentioned for the moment here. We 
may profitably, for practical or devotional pur- 
poses, on occasion restrict our religious dealings to 
‘Jesus only,” as all the God that matters then; but 
to say that God as shown forth in the human life 
of the Incarnate is all the God there is, or all the 
God we can know, is not good Christianity. 

2. The doctrine that God is finite is unsatisfac- 


102 GOD AND REALITY 


tory. We need not quarrel over words, and a doc- 
trine of God as finite, meaning self-limiting, may 
be so stated as to be quite different from that to 
which objection is made, namely, the doctrine that 
God is limited in his essence and power of action 
by beings quite independent of himself. Theists 
have been criticizing the finite-God idea steadily 
from the time William James sponsored it. A 
great deal of what has just been said about the 
religion of Jesus only applies to any religion of a 
finite God. But in particular, the acknowledging 
of God as finite, as one contender among others, 1s 
the last extreme of pluralism, which surrenders the 
universe as such, and allows for no final rationality. 
It is stirringly ethical, on the surface, when it chal- 
lenges us to take sides and fight for the good cause. 
But what makes God’s cause the right one to fight 
for? Conscience insists on the criterion of har- 
mony with the universe as the ultimate rule, and 
pluralism in the ethical sphere has no universe and 
no harmony. Further, religion can not take moral 
striving as its whole content: “the deeper expres- 
sions of religious faith and emotion—the utter- 
ances of the saints, the religious experts—appear 
quite irreconcilable with the pluralistic conception 
of a finite God, an unfinished world and a dubious 
fight. In fact, it is not too much to say, with Mr. 
Bradley, that ‘to make the moral point of view 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 103 


absolute’ is to have ‘broken with every consider- 
able religion.’ 2. Morality itself, when backed 
by the sense of the ultimate rightness and reality 
of its cause, is probably at least as strenuous in its 
striving as when it does not know whether it can 
win or not. A finite God may even interfere with 
other claims, possibly as good as his own, and be- 
come “‘an intruder, and an obstacle to the loyalties 
of the spirit.” ** In fine, when religion senses any- 
thing above or greater than what it has been taking 
for its God, it seems sooner or later drawn irresist- 
ibly to change over to this superior being, and take 
that for God, while it calls its old God a manifesta- 
tion only of the true God. So polytheisms and 
henotheisms grow into monotheism. 

3. The doctrine of God as the personification of 
the social spirit is defective. Arguments for and 
against this conception are handily put together in 
articles by Professors Ames and Hocking in the 
Journal of Religion, September, 1921. In an age 
and a country in which sociology is all to the fore, 
it is easy to see how strong must be the inclination 
to describe religion in social terms, and we have 
nothing to say against that; for we believe that 
religion is essentially social, and so is God. So far 
as it goes positively it is a saving belief; but if it 


22 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, 396. 
23 Hocking, Meaning of God in Human Experience, 226. 


104 GOD AND REALITY 


purports to be the doctrine of God, it is a dan- 
gerous half-truth. 

For if God is identified with the social spirit 
because what we expect God to do is what we 
find the Social Spirit doing, then there are some 
very important things which God (so defined) can- 
not do. He does scant justice to the individual; he 
cannot know the individual; he kills his own 
prophets and stones those who are sent unto him; 
he practically ignores the aspirations of queer 
people, the longings that some have for non- 
standardized values; great causes sometimes per- 
ish for a time, along with their champions, and 
this God may later on vindicate the great causes, 
but he cannot do more for the dead champions 
than declare holidays in their honor; he is growing, 
but meanwhile we who have to depend on his 
juvenile efforts at administration have only the 
consolation that some future age will be managed 
better, when God grows up; this God can do noth- 
ing for the soul of a man after he has departed 
from the body. ‘On its specifically religious side, 
then, the social god fails to meet the need for 
peace, for freedom of aspiration, and for indi- 
vidual response. And such must be the case with 
any deity who, like the social god, 1s fallible, mor- 
tal, and something less than completely real. “The 
finite god, sought by many a brave spirit of our 


GOD A PROXIMATE REALITY 105 


own time and of other times, we have no thought 
of denying, neither of disputing his religious value. 
We have already said that polytheism has its meas- 
ure of truth, as a protest against an abstract mon- 
ism which becomes empty. But the value of any 
finite god depends on his being an aspect of the 
God who is not finite.’”’ * 

The Social-spirit God, the cosmic Uncle Sam 
(the analogy is suggested by Professor Ames), 
whose worship is after the manner of an inspira- 
tional mass-meeting or a patriotic pageant, rather 
than either a prayer-meeting or a Solemn Mass, is 
more conspicuously finite than most forms of the 
finite God, because he is more conspicuously de- 
pendent on us—the human race makes him and 
supports him as it goes along. All then that is said 
of the insufficiency of the finite God in general is 
especially pertinent to the God who is the per- 
sonified Social Spirit. 

And the great general insufficiency of this whole 
way of looking upon God, as primarily a God 
among other entities, is that out of the whole uni- 
verse as we experience it it selects some things, or 
one thing, for its devotion, and passes by the rest, 
without a sufficient principle of selection. Or if it 
has a sufficient principle of selection, such as moral 
value, or self-standing reality, it goes beyond itself 


24 Hocking, in Journal of Religion, September, 1921. 


106 GOD AND REALITY 


into a doctrine of God-universal. It bears a cer- 
tain analogy to vision on one plane, without per- 
spective, without a third dimension. It has a 
surface distinctness, but it lures one on to the per- 
sistent human attempt to look “through the look- 
ing-glass.” ‘“This is the God for me’’ too often 1s 
the sole principle of choice. An earnest Christian 
once told me how his father would on occasion 
close the gates of the senses and go into a trance: 
‘‘and then something would come into him, and he 
thought it was God. . . . I don’t know what it 
was, but I know it wasn’t God.””, Why? Why did 
the father think it was God, and why did the son 
know it was not God? 

The inadequacy of the Proximate-reality God 
can be shown only if we can show the need of other 
elements in the God-idea. It is my conviction that 
so long as we are spatially and historically limited 
and individualized, our religion will find God 
something in particular, this and not that, here 
rather than there; and so the finite aspects of God 
will stand. But a God who is only a particular 
Object, a God who is only near, is only a near-God. 
And “no conception of God which takes him for 
less than the ultimate Reality will satisfy the de- 
mands of the religious consciousness.” 7° 


25 C, C. J. Webb, God and Personality, 137. 


CHAPTER IV 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 


How can you tell a God from a devil? As 
Professor Percy Gardner says, ‘‘belief in the dia- 
bolic personality rests on the same general ground 
of experience as belief in the divine personality.” * 
Many objects, real objects of experience, loom up 
from the environment as superior in power, mys- 
teriously extraordinary, awful, spiritual, living, 
possessed in some measure of some of the attri- 
butes of which we have spoken in the lecture on 
God as a Proximate Reality. ‘These objects are 
distinct from the universe in general, but are they 
gods or devils? ‘This question may not come up in 
the earliest stages of a religion, but when it does, 
it is answered by a discrimination according to 
value, the difference between good and evil. Of 
all the beings that come into our experience as 
powerful spirits, those that are also good are gods 


1 Practical Basis of Christian Belief, 151. 
107 


108 GOD AND REALITY 


or manifestations of God, while those that are not 
good are not divine. 

If, then, God is first a superior Reality at hand, 
our idea grows in intension by the added qualifica- 
tion that this superior Reality is also good. The 
growth of ethical value in the idea of God can be 
fairly well traced in the religion of Israel. The 
mystery-religions are in this respect an advance 
upon the ancient paganism. But in classical Greek 
philosophy, notably in Plato, the value of Deity 
was elevated into an essential, if not the essential, 
note in the definition of God. ‘The ideas are the 
great realities; the supreme idea is the Idea of the 
Good. ‘Therefore nothing must be attributed to 
God except what is good. Throughout Christian 
history, the goodness of God has had an assured 
place, though not always the same importance. 
Calvinism seemed to its opponents to be based on 
such a minimizing of the divine goodness that John 
Wesley could say to a Calvinist, ““Your God is my 
devil.” On the other hand, some moderns have 
tried to see whether the essential meaning of God 
could be stated purely in terms of value. God is 
supreme Value, whatever you can say of his power 
or even his existence. 

The place of value in any explanation of the 
universe is obviously a fundamental question for 
philosophy. St. Anselm really saw the issue and 


GOD * THE SUPREME VALUE 109 


stated the question: can there be a Supreme Value 
without existence? Kant’s moral argument runs 
in the same direction: can there be moral values 
without a moral Governor? ‘The universe is a 
realizing of eternal values, according to Neo- 
Fichteans. Idealism, though primarily concerned 
with ideas, naturally emphasizes those ideas which 
are also ideals. ‘The tendency is to identify God 
with supreme Value, whatever else he may be. 

But since psychology has come into such promi- 
nence, the notion of value has been made more 
warm and intimate, as it were. Religious judg- 
ments are value-judgments, related to pleasure and 
pain, looking in the direction of our wishes for the 
future, not our accountings for the past. God is 
not so much the First Principle of the universe as 
That which answers to the needs of our hearts, 
meets the demands of our experience, or conserves 
our values. He is the great Wish-fulfilment-idea, 
the sum of what we want. In a word, God is 
Value; or as Professor Ames says, ‘“The idea of 
God, when seriously employed, serves to general- 
ize and to idealize all the values one knows.” ? 

A marked loss of confidence in human ability to 
know absolute truth has been compensated by this 
gain in appreciation of value. We do not trust our 
logic or our metaphysics or our dogmatics so 


2 Psychology of Religious Experience, 318. 


TIO GOD AND REALITY 


heartily as was done before Kant; and we make up 
for our lack of faith in the truth by setting the 
standard high in the emotional field. Agnostic as 
we are to a greater or less degree, we seek not so 
much truth as worth; we do not prove proposi- 
tions: we verify values. In nothing is this more 
strikingly true than in what used to be called 
polemics, or the study of differences between 
churches. Instead of the old method of contro- 
versy, in which claims and counter-claims, texts and 
documents, dates and traditions, were argued with 
legal logic, we now compare the religious values of 
different tenets and practices, and are quite con- 
vinced that a reunion of Christendom can be 
achieved which will preserve and synthesize all the 
positive values in all the fragments of Christen- 
dom. When James De Koven defended his cere- 
monial, he did so on the ground that his ceremonial 
represented true doctrine; the same kind of cere- 
monial is more likely to be defended nowadays on 
the ground that it expresses a valuable religious 
attitude. The typical modern asks not what is 
rational or revealed truth, but what will make a 
satisfying religion, what will meet the needs of the 
heart. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 111 


II 


This idea of God as Supreme Value is undoubt- 
edly a sufficiently steady and constant part of the 
content of the God-concept to merit analysis, espe- 
cially in view of its congeniality with much that 
makes up the modern mind. 

1. It gives a principle for selecting God and 
things divine from among all objects of experience. 
We have seen that the Proximate-reality God rep- 
resents a selection, but without a sufficient principle 
of selection. If we test experience for the divine 
element in it, we may use various criteria, such as 
invisible power, weirdness, majesty, attractiveness; 
but none of these has satisfied humanity for long. 
Man reaches the place where he will call no being 
God who is not good; and will call no being good 
who is not what he means when he applies that 
term to a fellow-creature; and if such a being can 
send him to hell for not calling him good, to hell 
he will go. 

2. But is value a sound criterion of the divine? 
To use it is to rely more on what we want than on 
what we know. [If it is true that our feelings are 
prior to our reason, deeper and more reliable than 
our reason, which finds its own raison d’étre as 
instrument for satisfying our feelings, then value is 
a perfectly adequate criterion. In other words, 


12 GOD AND REALITY 


the exaltation of the Value-God is thoroughly in 
line with a leading tendency of modern psychology 
to find the affective and conative elements of per- 
sonality more basic and central and real than the 
intellectual elements. 

We get something we like; we want more of the 
same; we want an inexhaustible supply of it; we 
want a Perfect Being, or a new heaven and a new 
earth. We have an idea of such a Perfection. 
Then we try to find one or make one. We gen- 
erally meet with enough success in getting what we 
want to make us trust that it will ultimately be so: 
we believe that the Good God exists, or will exist. 
This belief itself is of great value as a guide and 
stimulant for our living: belief in success is a great 
aid to success. Treating a person as good is a 
recognized method for getting him to make good; 
treating nature as good is a way toward finding 
that nature is good. Treating values as really 
existent is a good way of making them really exist. 

In so far as our life is an earnest process of 
seeking satisfaction, a purposive thing, a craving 
and an urging and a striving, the leading principle 
of it must needs be value. For moral life, the in- 
spiration and the guide must be value. Religious 
life is in a high degree a process of seeking satis- 
faction, and its Object must be Value. The God, 
then, of morality and of religion is of necessity a 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE $113 


God who is the sum of all values. There is no 
mistaking the modern predilection for dynamics, 
the modern cult of will, the modern view of life as 
a going-after-something: like the moving-pictures, 
this is a great unveiling of the truth of our nature, 
much more true than the stiff and awkward 
(‘‘static’’) views of life which preceded it. And 
it is in accordance with this truly enlarged view of 
our life that the idea of God should be developed 
so as to make more luminous that element which 
fits the urgency of life—the Value of the Deity. 

3. The ontological argument starts with an 
Ideal, the Supreme Value, the idea of a Being than 
which nothing more perfect can be thought of; and 
it seeks to prove the existence in fact of this Being. 
If we start with value, we have upon our hands the 
problem of existence; this ontological argument is 
one of many ways of stating a relation between 
value and reality, with value as the starting-point. 
Always elusive, generally meaningless to the mat- 
ter-of-fact, kaleidoscopic in its varied restatements 
by the sophisticated, it is completely thrown over 
by some, and by others is called the one and only 
valid proof of the existence of God. The logic of 
it is something like this: the Supreme Value with- 
out existence would not be the Supreme Value; to 
avoid self-contradiction (within the value-scheme 
itself) we must say that the Supreme Value exists. 


114 GOD. AND REALITY 


Or we might say that the values of beauty and 
goodness are not enough to constitute the Supreme 
Value—the value of truth must also be included. 
This depends on a trust in the universe not to be 
self-contradictory; and it is this deep-seated trust 
that is the real basis of the argument. Moderns 
express this trust when they say that the best we 
can think of must be, that existence must corre- 
spond with our ideas, or that our minds and the 
world have evolved together, and they must be 
something of a mutual fit. Most elusive of all is 
Professor Hocking’s restatement of the argument: 
we cannot rest for long in a belief that either vis- 
ible nature or the human self is independently and 
basically real; but to think of nature and self as 
both less than self-sufficiently real, one must have 
already an idea of a self-existent Reality on which 
they depend; and this idea of God could not be 
thought without real experience of its Object: “I 
have an idea of God, therefore I have an experi- 
ence of God.” 3 

4. Kant could not accept the ontological argu- 
ment, and many, perhaps most, since his time have 
agreed with him that it is not at all secure against 


3 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, c. XXII. The 
meaning of this chapter is exceedingly difficult, if not impos- 
sible, to summarize; probably many have read it many times 
before any clear light emerged—and my summary above may 
be all wrong. 


GOD GEHE SUPREME VALUE.” 115 


the suspicion of subjective illusion. But his moral 
argument is really not very dissimilar. The domi- 
nating presence of moral values in our minds leads 
him to postulate the existence of God the under- 
lying Reality of all moral value. The moral law 
within involves the Moral Governor over all, if 
the universe is not illusory and self-contradictory. 
But there is in this also the possibility of illusion, 
and the possibility that the universe is not all of a 
piece. 

5. That fear, that after all, our ideals and 
values may turn out to be only our ideals, without 
substantial backing in the objective universe, has 
haunted those who accept the primacy of value in 
the idea of God; and those philosophers who must 
have a universe that hangs together continue to 
labor for the welding together of value and fact. 
Perhaps will, achieving the realization of values, 
is the key to the whole universe: God is value, 
because the whole universe is a building upon 
value. An impressive systematic statement of such 
a world-view by Dr. Hugo Muiunsterberg (The 
Eternal Values) was popular in this country some 
years ago. 

6. Quite recently, the Bishop of Manchester in 
his Christ the Truth, has based his world-view 
upon a metaphysic in which value is primary.‘ 

4 Chapter I. 


116 GOD AND REALITY 


“Now, if we ask for an explanation of the Uni- 
verse as a whole we are bound to formulate the 
answer in terms of Will. . . . there is in our ex- 
perience one, and only one, self-explanatory prin- 
ciple—namely, Purpose or Will. . . . The only 
explanation of the Universe that would really ex- 
plain it, in the sense of providing to the question 
why it exists an answer that raises no further ques- 
tion, would be the demonstration that it is the crea- 
tion of a Will which in the creative act seeks an 
intelligible good. . . . Will acts always for the 
sake of value, or good, to be created or enjoyed as 
a result of the action. It is precisely as so acting 
that it is self-explanatory and intrinsically intelli- 
gible. . . . [he question with which I am now 
concerned is this: should we conceive of things as 
existing independently, and possessing value as an 
attribute ? or should we think of value as itself the 
true reality which realizes its various forms 
through embodying itself in things—or through 
the creation of things for this purpose by the Di- 
vine Will? . . . The Universe is to be conceived 
as deriving its origin and unity from a Creative 
Will. But the correlative of Will is Good or 
Value; therefore the most fundamental element in 
things is their Value. This is not a property which 
they have incidentally; it is the constitutive prin- 
ciple, the true self, of every existent . . . every- 


GOD CIHE SURREME WALUE, 517 


thing exists so far as it is good. . . . Value is the 
element in real things which both causes them to 
be, and makes them what they are, and is thus fitly 
called Substance, in so far as this is other or less 
than their totality.” 

Quid means both what and why; for every what 
there is a why; the why is prior to the what, and is 
the real meaning, substance, of the what. ‘The 
Bishop is in arms against the old prejudice which 
makes the value of anything merely incidental, 
“adjectival,” to it, and especially against making 
God, as the Sum of Values, adjectival to the unt- 
verse, as if the universe could get along without 
God, without value. And he combats it not by 
taking God as ens realissimum regardless of value, 
but by taking value itself as ens realissimum. 

For the present I am citing Bishop Temple’s 
work simply as a new and vigorous example of the 
popular tendency to read the universe in terms of 
value. As a metaphysical position, it will have to 
bear as best it can the impact of competent criti- 
cism, which will probably result in some modifica- 
tion, naturally; but at present it stands as one of 
the ablest pleas on behalf of value, claiming for 
value almost everything in sight. 

° Professor John Dewey has some severe things to say of 
recent value-philosophies. “Value as it usually figures in this 


discussion marks a desperate attempt to combine the obvious 
empirical fact that objects are qualified with good and bad, 


118 GOD AND REALITY 


Bishop Temple betrays a certain impatience with 
others who will not go so far. Plato put the Idea 
of the Good first, but “he remains under the pre- 
dominant influence of geometry.’ Aristotle be- 
lieves in the value-test as a criterion of truth, but 
does not carry it through: the final cause (that is 


with philosophic deliverances which, in isolating man from 
nature, qualitative individualities from the world, render this 
fact anomalous. The philosopher erects a ‘realm of values’ in 
which to place all the precious things which are extruded from 
natural existence because of isolations artificially introduced. 
Poignancy, humor, zest, tragedy, beauty, prosperity and baffle- 
ment, although rejected from a nature which is identified with 
mechanical structure, remain just what they empirically are, 
and demand recognition. Hence they are gathered up into the 
realm of values, contradistinguished from the realm of exist- 
ence. Then the philosopher has a new problem with which to 
wrestle: What is the relationship of these two ‘worlds’? Is the 
world of value that of ultimate and transcendent Being from 
which the world of existence is a derivation or a fall? Or is 
it but a manifestation of human subjectivity, a factor somehow 
miraculously supervening upon an order complete and closed in 
physical structure? Or are there scattered at random through 
objective being, detached subsistences as ‘real’ as are physical 
events, but having no temporal dates and spatial locations, and 
yet at times and places miraculously united with existences? 
Choice among such notions of value is arbitrary, because the 
problem is arbitrary.” “Even that metaphysical theory of super- 
idealism which finds them to be eternal, and the eternal founda- 
tion and source of shifting temporal events, bases its argument 
upon the undeniable insecurity, the interminable elusiveness, the 
appearance and disappearance, of values in actual experience.” 
“Values are values, things having certain intrinsic qualities. Of 
them as values there is accordingly nothing to be said; they 
are what they are. All that can be said of them concerns their 
generative conditions and the consequences to which they give 
rise.” (Experience and Nature, 394-6.) We should try scien- 
tifically to know how to produce and maintain and increase 
them, and should criticize and appraise them by knowledge of 
their consequences. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE. 119 


where value comes in) is a true cause, but other 
causes engage his interest at least as much. St. 
Thomas identifies Good with Being, but “goes on 
to treat Being as prior because it is the first object 
of the intellect, and thereafter the whole concept 
of Value almost disappears.” Ritschlianism puts 
all religious convictions under the head of value- 
judgments, but does not claim metaphysical valid- 
ity for them—does not claim everything in sight 
for value. In Pringle-Pattison’s work, God, in 
whom all values are realized, “hovers uncertainly 
between two positions, being at one time the 
Ground of all existence and at another a character- 
istic of a universe which would apparently continue 
to exist (though shorn of its values) if He were 
torcease.. “Now alli this; it seems to me, means 
that the great company of the idealizers is content 
to establish a high and essential place for value in 
the scheme of things, yet without making it the 
ground of all existence. 

This more moderate position holds that values 
are real; they form a system which has objective 
reality as well as internal harmony; but so are 
mechanical causes objectively real, and they also 
form a system. The two systems do not appear to 
fit together satisfactorily. But if personal God is 
the author of both systems, we can see in the cause- 
system a field for the working-out of the value- 


120 GOD AND REALITY 


system, by personal, moral, free beings. Such, as 
I understand it, is the gist of Professor Sorley’s 
Moral Values and the Idea of God, which may be 
taken as an illustrious example of strong assertion 
of the reality of value, as belonging to the system 
or order of the universe, as an existing system in 
the sum total of reality. God is the author of 
value, as he is the author of the sum total of real- 
ity; but that does not mean that he is to be defined 
quite simply as the Sum of Value. God is not 
adjectival to the universe, but its source; value may 
be said to be adjectival to the universe, but value 1s 
not the whole substance of God. 

8. Surely at this point we can see a parting of 
the ways. God is the Source of All, and God is 
Goodness. Some will maintain both these propo- 
sitions, by contending that Goodness as such 
(Value) is the Source of All. Others will hold 
more firmly to God as Source of All, including 
goodness as an attribute of both God and “All,” 
but including also other attributes. Others will 
hold more firmly to God as Goodness, asserting 
some reality for him but not insisting that he is 
Source of All. In other words, the tension be- 
tween Goodness and Existent Fact makes most of 
us choose: either we take God as Source of Fact, 
and let goodness take care of itself, so to speak, 
or we take God as Goodness or Value, and let the 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 121 


facts take care of themselves. We do not have to 
choose if we can identify Goodness and Fact; but 
the farther apart they are to us, the more uncom- 
promising we must be in our choice. Most of us 
“believers,” without identifying them, emphasize 
one and keep some hold on the other: we take one 
road, but we keep an eye on the other, and keep 
within speaking distance of it. We are now con- 
cerned with those who take the value-road as the 
main way to God, though they will not quite lose 
touch with the reality-road. They say in effect: 
‘‘We do not know whether he is the Creator or 
not, whether all the forces of this world are his 
forces, whether he uses force at all, but we follow 
him because he attracts us to him by his beauty and 
his goodness; because he 1s everything lovable that 
we can ever think of, and more than that; because 
he is our Summum Bonum, and more than we can 
desire. When we say his beauty and his goodness, 
we mean any beauty and any goodness; for he is 
the Sum of all these values, and when we experi- 
ence any value at all we experience God. We 
need no ontological or other ‘proof’ of his exist- 
ence, because when we experience goodness we 
experience him, and that is all the verification any- 
body needs or can have. To that extent he cer- 
tainly exists, namely to the extent that values are 
actually experienced. He may be coming into ex- 


122 GOD AND REALITY 


istence ever more and more, and never within our 
time-sequence be perfectly actualized. But some 
of him exists here and now, and it is enough to 
draw us on in faith and hope. It may be that he 
exists perfectly actualized in eternity, and that it 
is only our experience of him which grows. But 
in one way or another he exists, and perhaps it 
does not matter whether he is complete and per- 
fect now or is growing into perfection.” Profes- 
sor C. A. Beckwith® mentions Ho6ffding, Leuba, 
William James, Irving King, E. S. Ames, and 
leaders of the Ethical Culture Society, notably 
Felix Adler, as showing how the “idea of God 
has developed and is now defined by the conscious- 
ness of values,’ and says for himself that ‘‘we 
have not to seek outside of the human conscious- 
ness for a self-evidencing ‘proof’ of the existence 
of God. Wherever one is conscious of values, 
there one is conscious of God; or, where value 
is there is God. If we discover truth, beauty, 
justice, goodness, sacrifice, service, we behold God. 
And the evidence is cumulative.”’ 

There is evident similarity between this last 
position and what has been noticed of recent de- 
velopments of the ‘‘Proximate-Reality” idea. 
Some of the same persons are concerned here as 
there. We could designate the above position as 


6 The Idea of God, 81-4, 197-9. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE § 123 


the ‘‘Proximate Value” concept, which is the most 
modern form of the ‘“‘Proximate Reality” concept. 
Where early religious experience identified its God 
by such notes as mysterious holiness, invisible 
power, or something so, the moderns identify their 
God by the note (or notes) of moral value, such 
as we find it close at home; so that in these mod- 
erns the divine Proximate Reality is Proximate 
Value. In some contrast with this is what we may 
call the Ultimate-Value idea of God, which is in- 
terested in absolute perfection, infinite truth, 
beauty, and goodness, as the essence of Deity. 
Such, it seems to me, is the thought of Plato, St. 
Thomas, perhaps Kant, Fichte and Minsterberg, 
and Bishop ‘Temple. 

Thus, as has been suggested, a great standard 
or criterion of divinity has been set up: out of all 
the various things of which this world is so full, 
those are divine (closely related to God at least) 
which appeal to us as having value. This standard 
is erected in the sphere of feeling. It has there- 
fore all the strength of hedonism, in recognizing 
that we cannot do otherwise than act according to 
our feelings. In morality and religion accordingly 
the God who appeals to our feelings is the main- 
spring of our action, furnishes the motive-power, 
the headway, of it. Whether this sole standard 
in the emotional sphere is enough for either ethics 


124 GOD AND REALITY 


or religion is open to question; whether it 1s 
enough for a theology is still more open to ques- 
tion. 


III 


But as it stands, the idea of God as Infinite 
Value, manifested in proximate values, furnishes 
a way of formulating divine attributes. Some at- 
tributes are ascertained by analysis of the idea of 
Infinite Perfection of Value; but such analysis is 
not quite pure, for it is necessarily tinged with 
our experience of values here and now. And the 
more colorful attributes are derived synthetically 
from that actual experience. 

1. In the first place, and generally, we should 
notice the ancient theological dictum that God and 
his attributes are identical. St. Thomas says,.. . 
cum Deus non sit compositus ex materia et forma, 

. oportet quod Deus sit sua deitas, sua vita, 
et quidquid altud sic de Deo praedicatur.*. And 
Professor F. J. Hall, ‘Each divine attribute is 
identical in esse with the divine essence.” * In the 
perfect Being it is not one thing to be, and another 
thing to be just, or merciful, etc., but for him to 
be is to be just and merciful, etc. Now in the 


7 Summa, I, iii, 3. 
8 Being and Attributes of God, 262. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE. +125 


value-terminology, if God is perfect, his attributes 
are values; and the doctrine means that the values 
of God are in re identical with his being—not in 
any disparaging sense ‘‘adjectival” or accidental 
to him—the Value of God is the Essence of God. 
though distinguishable in ratione. ‘This shows 
how the traditional theology, though it makes ex- 
istence prior to value, yet safeguards the essen- 
tiality of value in a way almost to satisfy the most 
extreme protagonist of the value-philosophy. 

2. Again in general, the conception of God as 
absolute perfection of Value bears on the “‘ways’”’ 
of ascertaining the attributes. The via affirma- 
tionis takes the form of attributing to God those 
good qualities which are experienced by us in 
created things— “proximate values.” The via 
negationis (which goes back to Plato and his Idea 
of the Good) rules out from the divine attributes 
all evil, even the slightest degree of evil, which is 
mixed with the good in created things. The via 
superlationis will not be used by those who accept 
only the ‘Proximate-Value’ God, but only by 
those who define him as Ultimate Value, the per- 
fect Ideal: it consists in making all the values of 
God superlative, infinitely good. 

3. All value is, or is based on, a harmonious re- 
lation of some sort. The great traditional kinds 
of value are truth, beauty, and goodness. Truth 


126 GOD AND REALITY 


is, as we ordinarily understand it, harmony be- 
tween things and the thought of them. If God 
is absolute Truth, he is self-consistent, immutable, 
omniscient. He does not play tricks with the laws 
of reason. Beauty is, in a broad sense, harmony 
between things and-our feeling toward them. God 
is perfect Beauty, as in whatever contemplation of 
him we may have we find surpassing satisfaction; 
the vision of God is a ‘‘Beatific Vision.’ Goodness 
is harmony between things and our action toward 
them. Goodness here is used broadly, of moral 
rightness in general, and it includes the moral 
attributes. As value, there is a “‘sense of kinship 
or ‘at-homeness’ which we may call satisfaction” ° 
involved in all three, truth, beauty, and goodness; 
they all are recognized by satisfaction in harmony; 
therefore value as such is indissolubly related to 
feeling—truth and goodness, as values, involve 
feeling, though beauty especially and distinctively 
does so. “Truth is here a confusing word,” says 
Bishop ‘Temple.*? ......‘’ Truth is\the perfecticor- 
relation of mind to reality, and is not itself, there- 
fore, apprehended as an object in the same way as 
(e.g.) Beauty. What is really intended is that 
there are three forms of absolute value—intellect- 
ual, esthetic, and moral.” 


® Temple, Christ the Truth, 29. 
ae 8 Lo 


GOD Th SUPREME VALUE 427 


4. Value is used as a corrective of cruder ideas 
of God, and an enhancement of such ideas of him 
as are retained. ‘The history of the doctrine shows 
this amply: a great deal of the change in men’s 
idea of Deity has been due to the finding of values 
as time went on, and the “funding”? of them in 
the idea of God. Mysteriousness, military might, 
loyalty, mercy, love, transcendent holiness in eter- 
nal quiet and silence, fatherly care for the littlest 
of his creatures, self-sacrifice even unto the Cross, 
—have not all these been gradually discovered as 
virtues, and incorporated into men’s thought of 
the divine as the ages have passed? In the main 
we may believe that this change is a progress, 
though in some cases values have simply gone out 
of style. For instance, the majesty of God, for a 
long time conceived as a very valuable attribute, 
has lately lost favor, and we constantly read dec- 
lamations against viewing him as a sort of glorified 
Oriental despot. But in the last year or so indi- 
cations have appeared that majesty is to come into 
favor again. Likewise there is fluctuation in the 
value of military virtues, and the “price” of glory 
raises a question. 

The attributes already noticed as manifested 
by the Proximate-Reality God are corrected and 
heightened by consideration of God as Perfection. 
God is living, but without any struggle for exist- 


128 GOD AND REALITY 


ence, for he is perfect life. He is spirit, not 
simply because he manifests himself as invisible, 
powerful life, but because spirit is better than 
matter—spiritual values are the highest values we 
know, and in fact there is no such thing as value 
except for spirit. ° He is powerful, and possessed 
of all power-value, so that for him to will any- 
thing is to bring it about. He is will, because 
will is action directed toward a purpose, Le., a 
value. He is not only present here and now, but 
omnipresent, because the Perfect Being would not 
be perfect if limited by space-intervals between him 
and anything. 

5. Besides these, there is the value of Truth, 
ascribed to God in superlative degree. As the 
Perfect Being, he must be self-consistent. “He 
cannot deny himself.’ Here the truth of God 
serves as a corrective upon imperfect notions of 
the divine omnipotence. To be able to do any- 
thing at all would not be so ideal as to be able to 
do only what is in harmony with his nature; so that 
he cannot do what is irrational or evil; he cannot 
make the false true, or the true false; he cannot 
make evil good, or good evil. 

The divine essence, because “pure form’’ or 
realized ideal, must be simplex. It seems to me 
that this is an aspect of the truth-value of God, 
that he is homoousios, that he is not a mixture or 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE. 129 


complex even of good characters, but wherever 
you find divinity, it is the same divinity that you 
find. William James bursts forth, “Pray, what 
specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself 
the better to God’s simplicity?” ** I cannot help 
thinking that his predilection for pluralism has 
shown here how deep it was in him. Surely there 
is no need to defend the value of simplicity, of 
single-heartedness, of self-consistency, of being 
true to oneself, whether the trait be a human one 
or a divine and so reliable counterpart to the hu- 
man in the very nature of things. But if there is 
no very nature of things, we cannot have that 
value. 

Again, because God is true, he is immutable, 
self-consistent through all the changes of the cre- 
ated time-sequence, not fickle, or arbitrary, or even 
progressive in his own life. 

And because he is perfect truth, his “‘idea’’ cor- 
responds absolutely with reality, and he is omnis- 
cient, without the limitations of psychological proc- 
ess in finding out things, but with the full value 
that we experience in our psychological knowledge, 
only raised to the infinite degree. 

6. God as Absolute Value is perfect beauty, as 
was said above. This is not ordinarily put in the 
lists of divine attributes, unless it appears in some 


11 Varieties of Religious Experience, 446. 


130 GOD AND REALITY 


heightened form such as the _ ever-recurrent 
“slory,” or “light unapproachable,” or “beatific 
vision.” St. Augustine uses it in direct address to 
God: pulcherrime ... Sero te amavi, pulchri- 
tudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavil” 
And not infrequently in these days preachers and 
devotional writers are re-discovering this attribute, 
and attempts are made to inculcate it also by art, 
including ceremonial, wherein there is much refer- 
ence to worshipping the Lord in the beauty of holi- 
ness. Often there is but little congeniality among 
masters of ceremonies: some will have everything 
‘correct,’ some will have everything “‘sensible,”’ 
and some will have everything beautiful. ‘The last 
is more assertive now than ever, and it cannot be 
denied, according to our present point of view. 

7. The third of the traditional absolute values 
is goodness, which in general means the value of 
harmony in action. In theology this appears as 
analysed into the moral attributes of God. 

Righteousness may as well be taken as equiva- 
lent to goodness in general as defined above. 
There is also a more restricted meaning of good- 
ness, as the attribute by which God confers bless- 
ings upon his creatures. Justice is goodness in 
accordance with the creature’s deserving; mercy 
is goodness in spite of the creature’s deserving. 


12 Confessiones, 1 4, X 2. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE. 131 


These two are popularly reconciled by the reflec- 
tion that perfect justice involves perfect sympathy, 
and perfect mercy likewise is sympathetic—to 
understand all is to pardon all. But a more true 
reconciliation, I think, is this: mercy means that 
all receive more good than they deserve, but jus- 
tice means that some receive more than others ac- 
cording as they deserve. A\ll the citizens receive 
(as an undeserved gift) the privileges of access 
to a library—that is mercy; but some have more 
extended and some more restricted benefit from it, 
because of differences in deserving—that is jus- 
tice. It seems to me that the Christian religion 
lays a tremendous emphasis on the great unearned 
good that is given to us all; but since different ones 
of us use that gift differently, there is a just dif- 
ference in the final outcome. To say that we all 
get just what we deserve, here or in a future life, 
is to deny the Gospel as well as the findings of our 
natural experience of value. And to say that by 
the divine mercy we shall all be ‘‘evened up” in 
the end, is to rob life of its moral meaning. I 
take the Parable of the Talents to mean that our 
differences in “reward” are based upon our differ- 
ent uses of gifts; and the Parable of the Laborers 
in the Vineyard, that often we seem to deserve dif- 
ferent rewards, when really many of us deserve 
the same reward, and get it—unless this parable 


132 GOD AND REALITY 


means simply that the paying of wages according 
to work done is not the economy of God. 

Love has already been mentioned, as an attri- 
bute of God sometimes apprehended as Proximate 
Reality. But if God is Perfect Goodness, love is 
seen to be his crowning attribute, because it repre- 
sents the highest moral value we know, the best 
harmony of pleasure and duty, egoism and altru- 
ism, self-assertion and self-forgetfulness. It might 
be worth noting that where goodness (as gener- 
osity) gives blessings to all creatures, love shares 
them, shares life itself, with fellow-persons, and 
is a higher attribute, as sharing is superior to giv- 
ing. It is more blessed to give than to receive; 
but it is more blessed to share than to give away.* 


13Jt is from the point of view of the value-theology that 
love enters into its glory as the crowning attribute of the Per- 
fect Ideal. Often we find very serious writers going further 
than this, and claiming that love is the very essence of God, 
that “God is love” is a completely satisfactory definition of God, 
that the terms God and Jove are equivalent and interchangeable. 
Now if this means what it seems to say, that love is all-there- 
is-of-God, his whole essence, substance, nature, I think it is an 
unjustifiable hyperbole—unless, of course, we simply decide for 
ourselves that we shall mean /ove when we use the term God. 
It may appear brutal to say so, but I think people need to know 
what they mean by love before they so exalt it. Is it an 
emotion? an attitude? a relation? the disposition of a person 
to be with a person? the sharing of life between persons? the 
value that one person has in the eyes of another? All these 
notions are relational; do they not all involve terms between 
which the relation holds? persons between whom love operates? 
nature or life or substance which is shared? If love is the 
whole meaning of God, does it not seem that God is simply 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 133 


Compassion has also been mentioned, as a char- 
acteristic of God-at-hand. It is no less character- 
istic of God conceived as perfect moral Value. 
But, from this same value-standpoint, it needs to 
be correlated with something else. A class was 
asked, ‘‘Do you want a God who suffers?” and 
they said, ‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘Do you want a God who gets 
defeated?” and they said, ‘No.’ Perhaps these 
were too patently leading questions; but the an- 
swers seemed to show that, quite from the value 
point of view, that of what we want, suffering must 
not be the last word about God. We want a God 
who is (as the theological manuals say) blessed, 
though for the joy that is set before him he en- 
dures the cross. Immortal, incorruptible, invin- 
cible, he must be, and possessed of a supreme joy 
and blessedness in his life, even in sacrifice, service, 
and suffering. 

Holiness has lately been analysed so as to show 
non-rational and non-moral elements in the idea. 
But holiness becomes a moral attribute eventually, 
when it means God’s “self-affirming purity,” 
whereby he is absolutely himself, and infinitely dif- 


a relation, simply a between-ness instead of a this-ness? And 
does not this, instead of making him substantial, or “adjectival” 
to the substantial universe, make him “prepositional” in it? It 
is surely safer to take love as an attribute of the divine nature, 
a relation between persons divine and human, than to make it 
mean the totality of God. 


134 GOD AND REALITY 


ferent from anything imperfect. Despite popular 
distaste for anything savoring of a “holier-than- 
thou”’ attitude, holiness (by some name or other) 
is a moral ideal, expressed in the current phrase, 
“Be yourself,” suitable for men at their highest, 
and therefore attributable in the superlative de- 
gree to the Perfect Being. 

So, as men’s sensitiveness to the values of truth, 
beauty, and goodness has been enhanced, their 
older ideas of God have been criticized and purged 
of evil elements, and idealized to accord with 
higher standards of worth. Attribute nothing evil 
to God; then positively, attribute confidently to 
God any qualities that are experienced or con- 
ceived as of value, only in infinite degree, and in 
a way that secures the moral harmony of the divine 
nature. Such has been a leading principle of 
theology in its slow improvement of the idea of 
God. It can be seen at work in the clearing away 
of various ancient forms of divine immorality, 
both Greek and Hebraic, and even Augustinian- 
Calvinistic. It can be seen at work today in the 
anxiety to avoid compromising the divine right- 
eous in such matters as vicarious sacrifice, original 
sin, sickness, and war. God means goodness; and 
now when men cannot believe that the Ruling 
Principle of all things is goodness, they will not 
call the Ruling Principle God. 


GODFT HE SUBREME VALUE (135 


IV 


Despite all that is said for God as the Absolute 
Value, there are very serious difficulties when one 
takes value as the core of the definition, or the 
primary notion, of God. They are, generally 
speaking, the defects and perils of a God of things 
as they ought to be, a God after man’s own heart, 
a wish-fulfilment idea of God. 

1. Men have done what children do when they 
draw or paint: there is an original, a given, from 
which they proceed to construct all manner of 
variations, partly because they cannot reproduce 
the model, partly because they already have in 
mind some inaccurate notions of what the model 
looks like, partly because they want to try novel- 
ties. So images of God have been graven by art 
and men’s device, certainly with some fact to go 
on, but also with flights of fancy going beyond the 
known fact, not by each man for himself so much 
as by great lines of tradition, as in the conven- 
tional pictures of the Madonna. The vulgarism 
of “wishing something onto” a person is here al- 
most literally true: men have “wished onto’? God 
all sorts of attributes. In course of time, within 
the scope of a single religion, a conventional 
image of God has grown up, comparable to the 


136 GOD AND REALITY 


conventional phenix or centaur or unicorn or Santa 
Claus or Uncle Sam. 

Then comes the question whether such a being 
exists. Whenever we start with an ideal, we are 
bound to face the question of existence. Those 
who would ‘“‘define’God in terms of value” are con- 
spicuously under this burden. The extent to which 
men have thought of God in terms of what they 
wished God to be, or at least in terms of the con- 
ventionalized image of men’s values, is revealed 
in the fact that apologetics has so constantly tried 
to prove the existence of God as so pictured.* 
The arguments for the existence of God are now 
in a more uncertain position than they have ever 
been, and popular agnosticism flourishes upon 
them. For popular agnosticism follows the lead 
of conventional apologetics in assuming a certain 
fairly definite idea of what God is like, and then 
denies that we can know whether just this sort of 
being exists. Herbert Spencer’s agnosticism was 
rather a denial that we can know what the Ulti- 
mate Reality is like; if Ultimate Reality is what 
we mean by God, then this is not an agnosticism as 
to the existence but as to the qualities, of God. 
But if God is defined in terms of values, that is, 
if the qualities of God are assumed, as is the case 
with popular apologetics, popular agnosticism is 


14 Cf, Perry, Approach to Philosophy, 108 f. 


GOD  THEeSUPREME VALUE) n137 


bound to attack the existence of the God who has 
those qualities. 

Very young persons are agnostics after this 
sort. J remember a boy in his ’teens, lying on the 
grass, gazing up into the sky, silent for a long 
while, then saying simply, “I wonder if there is 
any God.” ‘There must have been two visions in 
his mind, the one the boundless heaven above him, 
and the other the conventional God of the Sunday 
School; and the second could not fit in with the 
first. A perfectly robust little fellow of ten re- 
marked to me once, ‘‘Sometimes I think there’s a 
God, and other times I know there isn’t.” And 
I think I know about what he meant by “a God.” 
There is an extraordinary number of ordinary 
people who are in that condition: they have a 
conventional idea of God, and fidget and waver 
and doubt of his existence; they may go through 
terrible struggles and black nights of unbelief; they 
may or they may not come out with more faith. 
Their predicament is intolerable. Religion cannot 
be wholesome when its Object is hovering between 
existence and non-existence, and life cannot be 
wholesome under the influence of only such 
religion. 

Of course the conventional God-idea is not a 
fair representative of the God who is the Sum of 
All Values. But the way of affirming attributes 


138 GOD AND REALITY 


of God on the sole basis of their value does, I 
think, tend to make up images of God which cor- 
respond more to the heart’s desire than to reality; 
and it tends furthermore to conventionalization 
of the ideal, and then to a break-up of the con- 
vention and of the ideal too. In other words, it 
goes through stages similar to those of any art. 
And the children of this generation do not believe 
in the pictures of God made by the old masters. 
It is bad enough to be at the mercy of one’s own 
subjectivity: it is worse to be at the mercy of other 
people’s subjectivity. 

2. If men find themselves weak in belief in the 
existence of God defined in terms of value, they 
may make a great fight for proof, and may win 
it; but often in these days we see more or less of 
a tendency to let existence go by default, or to 
claim only such existence as all values have which 
are actually experienced. Some blessedness, some 
beauty, some goodness is obviously real: when we 
experience any of these, we experience God, and 
so some God exists, there is some divinity in the 
universe. ‘This attitude has the weakness inherent 
in holding on to a finite God, a God who signifies 
simply what-value-there-is-in-the-universe. A noble 
moral striving is the best fruit of such belief, but it 
is a striving without assurance that the goal can be 
reached, or even that it ought to be reached. 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 139 


Again we are reminded of the saying that to make 
the moral point of view absolute is to break with 
every considerable religion. If it is religiously in- 
tolerable to have a God whose existence is inter- 
mittently in doubt, it is also intolerable to have 
a God who exists as a burden to be carried on 
men’s shoulders. It is not simply that we are too 
lazy to do that; we are too ridiculously weak to 
do it, unless the constitution of the universe is 
with us in the attempt, and in that case God 1s 
more than the Sum of Values—he carries us, be- 
cause while overhead are the everlasting stand- 
ards, underneath are the everlasting arms. 

The drift towards reducing religion to the di- 
mensions of morality is unmistakable in this coun- 
try. People issue what they call “creeds’’: gen- 
erally they are not creeds at all—not matters of 
belief at all—but rules of conduct. Such perver- 
sion of the whole idea of a creed is illuminative 
of the popular moralism. Public worship is often 
treated almost wholly as a stimulation or inspira- 
tion to morality; private prayer is treated as a 
means of getting strength for morality; and ser- 
mons innumerable declare that religion as a whole 
is simply a means to morality. ‘Those who are 
still young and vigorous may find this satisfying 
(though I do not think they do, very much) ; but 
there comes a time when we can do no more striv- 


140 GOD AND REALITY 


ing, but can only say, ‘Father, into thy hands I 
commend my spirit’: a religion which has nothing 
to offer us then, in the way of actual, existent 
security of power, is not a full-fledged religion, 
from the point of view of value itself. 

3. A precarious hold on the real existence of 
God often results in a running down into subjec- 
tivity. We are tempted to drop the question of 
reality, and be content with “postulating,” acting 
as if such and such were true, because thereby 
we may get satisfaction. “I like to believe’ so 
and so, people say; this or that is an “attractive 
belief,’ or an ‘unattractive view.” Now if we 
have at different times in our lives tasted and 
seen how gracious the Lord is, and have recog- 
nized the Lord only by that graciousness of taste, 
we have surely found out for ourselves how fickle 
our taste is. he beliefs which a year ago we 
delighted in may seem very cheap and stale this 
year, and vice versa. 

The case is very closely similar to the case of 
hedonism in morality. Hedonism sets up its 
standard for action in the emotional part of our 
nature... It 4s right in ‘doing. ’so at leastste 
this extent, that we cannot call any act good 
that has no pleasure-tone, or satisfaction of 
feeling, init. But even for hedonistic satisfaction 
it is necessary to have another standard set up in 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE 141 


another part of our nature, the intellectual sphere: 
we cannot call any act satisfying unless it is in har- 
mony with known reality. With these two guiding 
lights we can steer our course; with this binocular 
vision we can walk circumspectly. Likewise the- 
ology is rightly hedonistic in that it will call noth- 
ing divine which has not value, which does not 
offer blessedness: it sets up a standard for the 
divine in the emotional sphere.** But if that is the 
only standard, our theology is very much at sea; 
we need another standard set up in the intellec- 
tual sphere, in recognition of what is. 

There may be some kinship between the the- 
ology of the pure Value-God and a certain popular 
optimism, which would fain make optimism com- 
pulsory. It hangs placards in business offices 
with the command “Keep smiling.” It com- 
mands soldiers to pack up their troubles in 
their old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile. Now 
the theology of that is that we should yield 
our allegiance to the favorable aspects, the 
positive values, of life, or in other words, that we 
should worship the God of Values. No one can 
doubt the vigorous wholesomeness of the code, if 
it is based on a faith that the favorable aspects 
of life are its truest aspects, that the Value-God 


_ 1 As a friend has suggested, value is rather the testing qual- 
ity of the divine than the divine substance itself. 


142 GOD AND REALITY 


is the True God. But without such faith, and re- 
gardless of fact, the habitual smile becomes a dis- 
gusting mask, and the command to smile becomes 
a proximate occasion of the sin of anger. 

4. Value is not thinkable except in relation to 
feeling; and the religion of God defined in terms 
of value (in so far as it does not reduce itself 
to morality) is a religion of feeling. That re- 
ligion is feeling has been, perhaps, the prevalent 
view among philosophers of religion as long as 
there have been any philosophers of religion. 
Apart from philosophy, religion itself has burst 
forth into movements, such as German Pietism 
and English and American Evangelicalism, in 
which feeling was undoubtedly the distinctive ele- 
ment. In more recent times, the kind of feeling 
and the object of the feeling have been somewhat 
different, but in present-day American Protestant- 
ism, considerably liberalized into social morality, 
there is great dependence on the “‘social passion,” 
and great effort to arouse it by intensive stimula- 
tion in mass-meetings, in which the art of produc- 
ing desired emotions has been furthered by modern 
practical psychology. The playing upon people’s 
emotions (I do not mean to speak disparagingly) 
is probably an art in its infancy, with every promise 
of an enlarging future as psychology is better 
understood; and religious leaders are making 


GOD? THE SUPREME) VALUE ) 1143 


more and more use of it. Furthermore, it is im- 
portant that we should hold it as settled that re- 
ligion can never get along without emotion, and 
a great deal of it. 

But for all that, as Professor Hocking says, his- 
torically “religion has never as yet been able to 
take itself as a matter of feeling.” *® It simply 
cannot be kept from running to dogmas, institu- 
tions, rituals, and laws. Some modern Christians 
declare that the prime requisite for being a Chris- 
tian is not the accepting of certain propositions or 
the enrolling in a society, but an ‘‘attitude to 
Christ.’ This may be interpreted variously, but 
from the earliest Christian days it would seem 
that the “attitude” was signified by the ‘‘gesture”’ 
of seeking baptism, with some sort of “T believe.”’ 
It was and is an attitude to something or some- 
body. Professor Hocking proceeds to argue that 
there is no such thing as feeling apart from idea; 
that feeling is always for an object, and ends in 
knowledge of an object; that feeling when rela- 
tively loose from its guiding idea does no work. 
And in his tenth chapter, on “idea seeking freedom 
from feeling,” he suggests that values themselves 
are determined by an idea of what is real apart 
from feeling; that the great idea that determines 
value is one’s Whole-idea, the non-impulsive back- 


16 Meaning of God in Human Experience, 57. 


144 GOD AND REALITY 


ground to all feeling and action, Substance. 
‘Some passion for objectivity, for reality, for Sub- 
stance, quite prior to other passions, there is at 
the bottom of all idea; a passion not wholly unakin 
to the love of God.” ** Religion, then, even if we 
take it as feeling, must be feeling for that which 
is, for Substance, for God the Ultimate Reality. 

5. The idea of God as the Sum of Values is 
bound to stand in some relation to reality: some- 
times it is said that value is reality, sometimes that 
value is real among other realities, and sometimes 
that it is enough to treat value as real without 
raising ontological questions. Some such posi- 
tions we have noticed. ‘There is yet one more 
relation between value and reality of which to 
speak, namely direct opposition. Ardent souls are 
often so dissatisfied with things as they are that 
they make for themselves an ideal world as con- 
trary to the actual as can be thought. Their values 
are a rebound from their facts. Their religion is 
a refuge from reality. ‘Their God is the Alto- 
gether Different. 

There is no need to criticize this concept of God 
as Value-Contrary-to-Reality, because it is only 
an extreme form of that dualism of value and 
reality which has been discussed often enough. 
But it may be questioned whether anyone has such 


17P. 123. 


CODE SURKEME VALUE. 1145 


an idea; and it is granted that probably no one 
espouses it consciously and consistently. If, how- 
ever, one has had experience of unhappy but de- 
vout people, one can recognize in some of them 
an unwillingness to face facts, to accept nature, to 
trust themselves to the universe, and a great long- 
ing to have everything reversed, and in the mean- 
time to flee as a bird to the hills, or escape into 
a church. The irreligious often accuse all the 
religious of merely trying to escape from “hard 
reality.’’ Where asceticism is wrong, it is because 
it is not supra naturam in the direction nature 
takes, but contra naturam, and the theology of a 
wrong asceticism works not by the via affirmationis 
or superlationis, not even simply the via negationis, 
but a via contradictionis. ‘There is dire distress 
of soul and body in the following of this way, 
and many there be that find it. It is said that a 
large proportion of insanity is rooted in unwilling- 
ness to face the facts, that if the patient can be 
helped to face the facts he can be cured, and that 
in everyday life among “sane” people there is a 
great deal of this kind of insanity. It would be 
a great pity if people could be restored to sanity 
only by being cured of their religion. 

It is one of the sanest things in Christian belief, 
that Christ is of one substance with the Father. 
As regards economy, God the Father ‘‘made me 


146 GOD AND REALITY 


and all the world,” and God the Son ‘redeemed 
me and all mankind.” It were a sort of theologi- 
cal insanity to hold that God the Son redeemed 
mankind from God the Father, that the Redeemer- 
God is contrary to the Creator of Nature. What- 
ever difference in economy there may be, whatever 
tension between Nature and Redemption, as be- 
tween Reality and Value, God is one, and is both 
Creator of Nature and our Redeemer from the 
evil; so that whatever the evil may mean it is not 
synonymous with the nature of things as they are. 

Now it is hoped that something like just recog- 
nition has been given to the rightness of the idea 
of God as the Perfection of All Value. It is the 
answer, and the only possible answer, to the ques- 
tion “‘Why?” asked of the universe. It is neces- 
sary to morality and to moral religion. It is a 
fruitful idea for the ascertaining of divine attri- 
butes, for criticism of crude ideas of God, and 
advance into better appreciation of what Deity 
must mean. It is a growing portion of the idea of 
God, not at first clearly seen, but gradually as- 
suming a more commanding place, until in some 
of the finest minds of today it is the definitive 
meaning of the word God. 

On the other hand, we can see but a dubious suc- 
cess in the attempt to interpret God as wholly or 
even primarily Value. Without trying to cope 


GOD THE SUPREME VALUE. 147 


metaphysically with such questions as the priority 
of value to existence, or the making of value 
equivalent to substance, we have tried to follow 
out some of the consequences of taking value as 
the substantive element of the idea of God, and 
to weigh them from the standpoint of value itself. 

If you take Goodness as the noun in the defini- 
tion of God, real is an adjective, which may or 
may not belong to the noun goodness: in other 
words, if you assume value by definition, you 
have the question of existence. [he proof of 
the existence of the Value-God is dubious, unless 
one is satisfied with a quite finite, even at- 
tenuated, existence (God exists in so far as any 
value is actually realized) ; and a religion which is 
intermittently weak on the existence of God is not 
a strong religion at all; a religion that has to make 
its God become real by human striving is likewise 
not of the greatest value as a religion. 

Or if we decline the issue as to God’s existence, 
and lapse to subjectivism—we want a God, and 
that is all there is to it—we are under the capri- 
cious, fickle tyranny of our wishes, and the best 
we can hope for is disillusionment. If we go (as 
some do) practically the whole length of believ- 
ing in a God and a heaven consisting of contraries 
to what is real now in our experience, we have 
lost the essential grip on our sanity. 


148 GOD AND REALITY 


It will certainly seem as if mere travesties of 
this view have been set forth, that the noble exal- 
tation of the value-standard has been parodied by 
pointing to degenerate offshoots of it. But I fear 
that such degeneration (like the degeneration of 
a noble hedonism) is too apt to follow in many 
people’s minds from this sort of beginning.** 

What seems to me most evident through all 
this is that the more thoroughly you think in terms 
of value, the more you feel the value of truth, 
reality, existence, substance, which is itself a value, 
but appears to loom up as a background to all 
value. All that is needed is for value to complete 
itself by appreciation of its own foundations; and 
that consideration suggests the beginning of an- 
other chapter. 


18 Compare a crass sort of prayer which apparently aims to 
harness up God. 


CHABTE RV 
GODS Ee UTS DME a REALITY. 
I 


Bits of reality, moments of heightened experi- 
ence, definite, concrete objects, have loomed up 
out of the general aggregate of things as espe- 
cially manifestations of some kind of superiority, 
mysterious and powerful, as we have seen. Men 
have called these Gods, and then later have called 
them manifestations of God. Some sort of value 
they always had, if only the value of danger- 
signals; as ages of religion have passed, that 
which proposed itself as divine has been more and 
more tested for its higher values, and especially 
its moral character, rejected or repictured in some 
features if it were defective in goodness, crowned 
with many crowns if it revealed supernatural 
worth. God has appeared as a Proximate Reality 
which is Good. 

But religion, and thought about religion, and 
thought about things in general, will not rest sat- 

149 


150 GOD AND REALITY 


ished with a God. He is real in our experience; 
we may have a psychology of that religious ex- 
perience, and a revealed religion built upon the 
high-points of religious experience, with a dog- 
matic theology codifying the divine attributes so 
ascertained. But.if we judge anything to be real 
and true, we can hardly mean less than that it har- 
monizes with our universe of experience; and this 
leads on from the Proximate Reality to that uni- 
versal Reality by which every detail must prove 
itself real. If we accept for the time being a God 
who appears to be finite, however good he may 
appear, we cannot feel sure that our loyalty to 
him is not an unwarrantable interference with 
higher loyalties, unless we can be confident that this 
finite is in some sort a member of infinite reality. 
‘In fine, any and every radical commitment to a 
single aim, heroic adoption of a cause as one’s 
own fate, ultimate risk and wager against destiny, 
can be justified whether before morals or even 
good sense, only if the meaning of the commitment 
in question is this: that this thing to which I give 
myself is a character of the One which is real and 
good, destined to endure, held in place when es- 
tablished by all the self-righting forces of the uni- 
verse.’ * ‘Che, Proximate Reality, as real, seeena 
drawing us on to the Ultimate Reality, and as re- 


1 Hocking, Meaning of God in Human Experience, 178-9. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 151 


ligion matures, “‘no conception of God which takes 
him for less than the ultimate Reality will satisfy 
the demands of the religious consciousness.” ? 

There has been also an insistent reaching out 
beyond Value, when men have taken Value as the 
defining meaning of God. Among the values 
stands the value of truth, existence, reality. At 
the very least, goodness or righteousness involves 
some sort of consistency and harmony of char- 
acter, which is a kind of reality. And feeling 
craves an object, and will have an idea of an ob- 
ject. Agnosticism as to the existence of the God 
of Perfect Goodness is not satisfactory in re- 
ligion. ‘The fickleness of our desires makes us 
weary of the process of God-picturing according 
to our desires, and we begin to prefer making the 
best of what is. We want to find validity for our 
values, and seek this in a substantial background 
of reality, which is not of the stuff that dreams 
(however fine) are made of, but which is the 
basis for all our dreams. 

So then, if we start with God as Value, we are 
inevitably lured on to the question of God as 
Reality, and if we start with God as Proximate 
Reality, we cannot help seeking God as Ultimate 
Reality. 


2 Webb, God and Personality, 137. 


152 GOD AND REALITY 


II 


This idea, of course, has a history. 

It is not present in primitive ideas of God: 
there the distinct Object among objects predomi- 
nates. ‘Something like the Absolute appears 
from time to time in the history of religion; but 
it is noteworthy that it is not worshipped. ‘There 
is no temple to Brahman. The Algonquins did 
not pray to Manitou. Unkulunkulu, as most 
primitive near-Absolutes, is too far off and has no 
interest in the affairs of men; whence petitions 
must be addressed to the nearer and more finite 
spirits. [he same judgment occurs a hundred 
times in the various religions of the world. In 
all religions have mediators of some kind cor- 
rected the tendency of the great God-father to 
fall in with the Absolute, giving the Deity effective 
human sympathies and fighting interests. Ahura 
Mazda must have his group of nature-gods and 
his retinue of Amesha Spentas. Even Jahweh 
as he tends to be thought of as Absolute ceases 
to deal with men in person and works only through 
messengers or through the Logos.” * There is, 
then, a “tendency of the great God-father to fall 
in with the Absolute,’ even in fairly early re- 
ligions; but this is accompanied by a loss of reli- 


3 Hocking, Meaning of God in Human Experience, 185-6. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 153 


gious relations, as if the Absolute could not be the 
God of religion. It is a sort of kenotic theory 
reversed: in order to become infinitely exalted and 
glorious, the God must lay aside those attributes 
which make him near and dear to men. 

At first one would say that Israel never thought 
of the Ultimate Reality. But on second thoughts 
we can identify poetical expressions which mean 
that, if poetry means anything. All the corners 
of the earth, heaven and hell,—in such expressions 
the universe is denoted, and God is over all, 
under all, and in all. He “fashioned”’ all: 
anthropomorphic creation is the way in which is 
pictured the dependence of all things for their 
existence upon the divine World-ground. It is not 
philosophical language, and the interest is reli- 
gious rather than purely metaphysical, but it does 
mean that God is the Source and Ground of the 
universe. Sometimes there is an attempt to cor- 
rect the Value-idea of God by an appeal to the 
Reality-idea. A righteous God must do so and so, 
one says, speaking from his sense of moral value; 
for shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? 
And the reply is sometimes the unwelcome potter- 
and-clay argument, the meaning of which is that 
God is the Reality, after all, and it does not be- 
hoove us to set up our standards of what he ought 
to be and do, against what he really is and does; 


154 GOD AND REALITY 


good is good because it is in accordance with the 
nature of things, or the Nature of God. Such an 
appeal seems to be worked out after long moral 
consideration in the Book of Job, and more briefly 
as a sort of last resort, by St. Paul in the Epistle 
to the Romans. “What shall we say then? Is 
there unrighteousness with God? God _ forbid. 
For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom 
I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom 
I have compassion. . . . [Thou wilt say then unto 
me, Why doth he still find fault? For who with- 
standeth his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou 
that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed 
say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make 
me thus? Or hath not the potter a right over the 
clay, from the same lump to make one part a 
vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor ?”’ 
In the rest of the section he suggests a justification 
for God’s doing, but it is God’s doing anyway, 
whether we can justify it or not.* The later 
Judaism tended to think of the Lord as the Abso- 
lute, indeed, but it is a great exaggeration (not so 
common now as a dozen years ago) to say that 
in Jewish belief the divine transcendence excluded 
direct dealings between God and men; the Jews 
have done their part, in fact, to show that men can 
have religious friendship with the Absolute, 


4 Romans, ix, 14-24. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 155 


But the idea of God as Ultimate Reality of the 
universe was more adequately expressed by the 
Greeks than by the Hebrews. Its appearance in 
Aristotle is a momentous thing in the history of 
theology. If we read this history aright, the great 
Greek contribution to the Christian synthesis was 
an adequate idea of the universe and an idea of 
God as the Cause of it. ‘The patristic theology, 
after some vicissitudes, identified the “God of the 
Jews” with the Prime Mover of the Cosmos; and 
that is another very momentous thing in history. 

The systematic theologians of the Middle Ages 
were aware of the issue between being and good- 
ness as to precedence, though with them God is 
assuredly both Primum Ens and optimus. Plato 
through Augustine held them to the identity of 
good and being in re, but the great line of scholas- 
ticism through St. Thomas places being prior to 
value. Accordingly he defines God thus:—WNe- 
cesse est in rerum natura inveniri unum primum 
ens immobile, primum efficiens, necessarium, non 
ex alio; maxime ens, bonum, et optimum; primum 
gubernans per intellectum, et omnium ultimum 
finem, qui Deus est.’ It is in the same spirit that 
a modern scholastic work, the Dogmatic Theol- 
ogy of Pohle-Preuss, for instance, seeks for a 
primary, defining attribute of God, and finds it in 


5 Summa, I, ii, 3. 


156 GOD AND REALITY 


self-existence. “To define the Divine Essence 
scientifically, therefore, we must try to discover 
among God’s many attributes one which is the 
root and principle of all the rest. This particular 
attribute is Aseity or Self-existence.”’ ° 

The great upset in belief in God which goes 
with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was 
disruptive and disastrous on the face of it. Yet 
we can see how it almost had to be, and how there 
was a saving grace in it after all. For the picture 
of God had become conventionalized according 
to the art of antiquity, and did not look as if it 
could represent the God of the universe as it was 
then seen to be. The philosophers of those days, 
like the scientists of these, found a universe that 
did not altogether harmonize with the older pic- 
ture of the Supreme Reality of it. And their 
great service to theology is that they made their 
ideas of God develop to keep pace with their 
ideas of the universe, believing that whatever else 
God may be, he must be defined as the Ultimate 
Reality of the universe. According to the Creed, 
God is ‘‘maker of heaven and earth.” By the 
early modern philosophers he is redefined as Su- 
preme Substance, or all Substance, or First Mo- 


6 God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes, 133. The 
argument occupies the whole of Part II. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 157 


nad, or Original Source of all things, or Knower 
of all things, or Supreme Being. 

The expression ‘Ultimate Reality” owes its 
popularity, I think, to Herbert Spencer. He found 
he must sacrifice all the attributes (except inscru- 
tability), in order to keep the noun-meaning of 
God. We have seen how this is agnosticism not 
in regard to the existence but in regard to the 
nature of God, if we take Ultimate Reality as the 
definition of God. 

Absolute Idealism, or Absolutism if one prefers, 
offers a One and Ultimate and Infinite Being which 
at least may be called God. All depends. If 
God is defined as the Ultimate Reality, God is the 
Absolute. If God is defined as the distinct Object 
of religion or as the perfect Moral Value, then 
perhaps he is not the Absolute. 

Pluralism and Pragmatism have no use for an 
Ultimate Reality, and when they include God they 
mean a finite Proximate Reality or a Sum of 
Values. 

Theistic apologetics has always reacted to the 
current situation in philosophy. Accordingly, God 
has been defined therein as the Absolute, or the 
Ultimate Reality, when such were the generally 
accepted ideas. Since the onslaught of modern plu- 
ralism and pragmatism against the Absolute, apol- 
ogetics has sometimes tried to put theism into the 


158 GOD AND REALITY 


terms of the newer theories. But in any case, 
theism still, perhaps more than ever, finds that in 
pleading for God it must state its definition of 
God, and there is great use of synonyms like Ulti- 
mate Reality, World-ground, Source of all exist- 
ence, etc. That is as it should be, I think. One 
is justified in being impatient if serious writers let 
the idea of God hover uncertainly between dis- 
tinct, and now distinctly recognizable, meanings 
of the term. 


Til 


The term Ultimate Reality is but one of a num- 
ber of expressions which with slight shadings of 
meaning are practically synonymous. Perhaps it 
is not the best one. Instead of “reality,” “being” 
has been used, as also “‘substance.”’ Earlier than 
these, the thought is not so much of the superior 
reality of a God as of his superior power, offensive 
and defensive: later reflection has gone behind 
power to the supposedly more fundamental Being 
that has power. One could, however, to express 
this same general side of the meaning of God, 
speak of him as the Ultimate Power, or Being, 
or Substance, or something similar. ‘‘Ultimate,”’ 
too, is not the only term that might fairly be used 
for the same general idea: “first,” or “primary,” 
or “original,” might be better, as they suggest the 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 159 


idea of God as Source, Creator, Cause, Primum 
Mobile; but “‘first’”? is open to the objection that it 
suggests a mere time-order, as if God were to be 
found as the first of a temporal series. ‘Ultimate”’ 
might also suggest a time-order, as if God were 
a ‘far-off divine event” still to come at the end 
of time. It does not, of course, mean that, but 
means ultimate in the sense of the goal of all en- 
quiry, the final answer to the most penetrating 
question, the as-far-as-you-can-go in the search for 
fundamental fact. “First Cause’? and ‘Prime 
Mover” may be taken as equivalent, but since mod- 
ern criticism of the ideas of causation and motion, 
it is not well to depend on them as definitions of 
God. There is also a good deal of modern criti- 
cism of every concept of a fixed, final, static, im- 
mutable fact; but I do not see that Ultimate Real- 
ity 1s necessarily an actionless entity. It may be 
that it is constant in some such way as the locus of 
a moving point is constant, or as the formula of a 
curve in analytical geometry is a fixed and timeless 
fact about ceaseless motion. ‘Ground of all exist- 
ence” is perhaps most exactly what we mean, but 
‘Ultimate Reality” is familiar now, and will do 
very well. 

Looking for the causes of things is one of the 
most universal of human activities, and religion 
includes it. Who made the world? God made 


160 GOD AND REALITY 
the world. Who made God? ‘That is the uni- 


versal childish dialectic, and it is relentless in its 
demand for ultimate reality: it will not stop with 
any God-idea that falls short of the absolutely 
original. At the end of this line of questing 1s 
the expression “God’’ used to mean essentially 
that which is the most utterly real of all things, 
the First Being, upon which all other things de- 
pend for origin and continued existence. 

There can be no question of the existence of 
what is by definition the most fundamentally exist- 
ent being of the universe. We can make sure of 
that by starting with the idea of God as Whatever- 
it-is that is ultimately real, and leaving every other 
attribute to be looked for later. Assume the exist- 
ence and nothing else. I am inclined to think that 
ordinary people do this anyhow; they do not take 
much stock in the arguments for the existence of 
God, yet most of them believe that “there is a 
God” of some sort, with some attributes, upon 
which they are more or less agnostic. Is it not at 
least possible that without being very conscious of 
it, without thinking at all clearly, they have in the 
back of their heads this definition of God, as 
Whatever is responsible for all existence, and 
therefore is indubitably existent by definition? 
Pure being, it is true, does not stand even as a 
pure zdea in people’s minds: it is of course mixed 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 161 


with the traditional imagery of God; but that quite 
irrational-seeming acceptance of the divine exist- 
ence without reliance upon any argument for it 
may in a confused way be fundamentally rational 
if God is unconsciously assumed as the Ultimate 
Reality. 

The expression “Ultimate Reality” implies 
something like grades of reality. But it does not 
necessarily involve that. If all things are equally 
real, and no reality is ulterior to another, then by 
definition all things constitute God. But on some 
ground or other, by the test of durability, of self- 
consistency, of causativeness, or something else, 
men generally judge the surface of things to be 
permeated with contingency, as being appearance 
rather than reality. Yet even so, if we start with 
God as Whatever is ultimately real, we give every- 
thing a chance to show itself divine by showing it- 
self real. On this basis, we might be convinced 
that time, duration, energy, even space, and other 
disputable things, are divine attributes, if we can 
be convinced that they are absolutely real. 

We give everything a chance to show itself di- 
vine, according to the Value-theology, by setting 
a standard in the emotional field, like good hedon- 
ists. But we have seen how, on the basis of 
hedonism itself, the sole standard in the feelings 
is untrustworthy—the more directly you seek hap- 


162 GOD AND REALITY 


piness itself, the less accurately you find it. ‘To use 
the value-standard sanely, we need to see it in its 
relations to another standard, set in the rational 
field. Defining God as the Ultimate Reality sets 
the standard for divinity in the rational sphere, 
in the sense that it calls for true knowledge of 
what is. If the universe cannot measure up to a 
rational standard, if it will not hang together as 
one universe in some fundamental way, we can 
make nothing of God the Prime Reality except the 
barest formula. God means nothing from this 
point of view unless the universe is one system of 
reality. 

All science works on the basis of a belief that 
the universe is one system of reality, and that 
within the phenomenal sphere at any rate its rea- 
sonableness 1s akin to man’s reason. What makes 
it so is not a natural-scientific question. Scientists 
say repeatedly that as scientists they are not con- 
cerned with ultimate origins. Then for us to say, 
‘Ultimate origins—that is what we mean by 
God,” is not to be anti-scientific. But to science 
and theology both, the Ultimate Principle must be 
the ultimate principle of the things which we scien- 
tifically know. God is not simply a formula for 
filling in the gaps of science, even the first great 
gap at the basis of all science, but is the Ultimate 
Reality of the whole real universe; and everything 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 163 


science discovers as phenomenally real has some- 
thing to do with the Ultimate Reality of the phe- 
nomenal. It is not our notion that in these few 
words we have summarily arranged for amicable 
relations between science and religion. It is not an 
easy matter. But I think that the idea of God as 
the Ultimate Reality of the universe is more con- 
genial to science than any other, the concept of 
“Reality” holding all truth together organically, 
whether natural science or theological science, and 
the differentia ‘Ultimate’ expressing the distinc- 
tion between the natural and the theological sci- 
ence, as scientists themselves generally allow for it. 

Objective fact—of whatever sort it be—that 1s 
the value expressed by defining God as the Ulti- 
mate Reality. And it is an idea which does work. 
Even when we are most set on getting something 
we want, and even when we know very little of 
objective fact, the resolution “I am going to 
achieve my heart’s desire according to the very 
nature of things’’ is a good orientation. It has 
often been observed that a farmer or a breeder 
may say, “I want to raise wheat on this ground,” 
or “I want to raise seedless raspberries”: and if 
he goes ahead regardless of the nature of the 
ground or the raspberry he will not succeed so 
well as if he pays the greatest possible deference 
to all the actual laws of the land and its life. Even 


164 GOD AND REALITY 


an acrobat does his superhuman performances not 
by his sheer strength, but by his strength applied 
just where it will count for most, in accordance 
with an unusual knowledge of physical laws. 

When we turn our faces to God as Ultimate 
Reality, we are in the position of facing the facts: 
we at least intend to face the facts. And there 
is sanity. The first occasion on which we have 
stumbled upon the thought that we need not be 
afraid of any truth, because all truth is God’s 
truth, or the first time we have heard that gospel 
from another, is a great moment in our theological 
education. It is liberating, as God the Ultimate 
Reality is that Truth which makes us free. It 
liberates us from our insistence on our own notions 
of what is valuable; it frees us from idols. A 
friend has suggested to me that Christianity is 
neither optimism nor pessimism, but disillusion- 
ment. 

For the God of our moral striving must indeed 
be the Sum of Ideals or Values, but not of Ideals 
or Values just as we project them from our feeling- 
world. What we admire and love enduringly 
must coincide with what is in harmony with reality, 
in tune with the universe; and we shall rightly 
place our admiration and love the sooner if we 
fairly soon begin to tune up to the universal pitch. 
Kant, with no confidence in any other way to 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 165 


knowledge of Ultimate Reality, was yet sure of 
this, that there must be an Ultimate Reality for 
morals, a categorical imperative set over against 
the fickleness of human desires. Nowadays we 
call him too austere, and are disposed to insist that 
nothing can be good that is not somehow colored 
with the pleasure-tint; but the more our moral 
values contain of universal, reasonable validity, 
the more sure we are of satisfaction in them. 

If morality needs attention to underlying fact as 
conditioning, even determining, all its values, the 
same is true of religion. Absolute Being, Ultimate 
Substance, and all the other resonant expressions 
of the sort, are often brushed aside as having no 
religious significance. On the contrary, it is cer- 
tainly true that to many natures, if these ideas 
(or this aspect of God) were to be excised from 
their prayer-life, a very cheap sort of religion 
would be left. People can be intensely religious 
toward the Ultimate Reality as such. 

It has been said that Judaism tended to make 
God ever more transcendent and universal, to 
make the God-father “fall in with the Absolute,” 
but it is sometimes not noticed that prayer is still 
made to him directly, and that angels, principali- 
ties, and powers were not of a sort to make God 
inaccessible to man’s religious approach. More 
than this, it may fairly be claimed that the newer 


166 GOD AND REALITY 


note of the divine universal power, majesty, omni- 
presence—in other words the newer and fuller em- 
phasis upon God as Ultimate Reality of all the 
universe—brought a greater depth of religious 
feeling on its own account, and was thus a substan- 
tial gain to religion itself. Fully a dozen of our 
Psalms are devoted to the praise and adoration of 
God for his universal “works,” with little or no 
reference to the uses we can make of them, as in 
rescue from hardship, vindication against enemies, 
etc. Psalm 148 is typical of these: “O praise the 
Lord of heaven: praise him in the height . 

for he spake the word, and they were made; he 
commanded, and they were created. He hath 
made them fast for ever and ever: he hath given 
them a law which cannot be broken.” * ‘The Book 
of Ecclesiasticus contains a passage of great splen- 
dor, beginning, “I will make mention now of the 
works of the Lord,” and concluding with this: 
‘‘We may say many things, yet shall we not at- 
tain; and the sum of our words is, He is all. How 
shall we have strength to glorify him? For he 
himself is the great one above all his works. .. . 
When ye glorify the Lord, exalt him as much as 
ye can; for even yet will he exceed: and when ye 
exalt him, put forth your full strength: be not 


7Cf£. Psalms 6, 19, 24, 29, 47, 66, 93, 96, 104, 111, 139, 148, 150. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 167 


weary; for ye will never attain.” ® Such religious 
utterances as these, and even more poignantly the 
Book of Job, show that there is possible a more 
or less “disinterested” love of God the Cause of 
all Nature. 

Again, by way of tremendous contrast, yet for 
further illustration of the religious attitude to God 
the Ultimate Reality, we may remind ourselves 
of Marcus Aurelius’ “Everything is harmonious 
to me that is harmonious to thee, O Universe.”’ 
Pantheism can indeed be religious, with Spinoza’s 
amor intellectualis Det. 

St. Augustine’s love of God the Infinite is ex- 
pressed in the very beginning of the Confessions. 
Quo deus veniat in me, deus qui fecit caelum et 
terram? itane domine deus meus, est quicquam in 
me, quod capiat te? an vero caelum et terra, quae 
fecisti et in quibus me fectsti, capiunt te? an quia 
sine te non esset quidquid est, fit, ut quidquid est 
capiat te? quoniam itaque et ego sum, quid peto, 
ut venias in me, qui non essem, nisi esses in me? 
non enim ego iam inferi, et tamen etiam ibi es. 
nam etst descendero in infernum, ades. non ergo 
essem, deus meus, nisi essem in te, ex quo omnia, 
per quem omnia, in quo omnia? etiam sic, domine, 
etiam sic. quo te invoco, cum in te sim? aut unde 
venias in me? quo enim recedam extra caelum et 


8 Ecclesiasticus xlii, 15; xliii, 33. 


168 GOD AND REALITY 


terram, ut inde in me veniat deus meus, qui dixtt: 
caelum et terram ego impleo?? And this ardent 
religion of adoring union with God the Ultimate 
Reality, not by denying the apparent reality of na- 
ture but finding God through all experience, is the 
heart of Augustine’s mysticism. 

The more ancient hymns of the Breviary take 
austere delight in the contemplation of God the 
Source of All. Aeterne rerum conditor, Noctem 
diemque qui regis. . . . VUhese have not the re- 
iterated dulcedo of St. Bernard, and are not in 
the tone of Sanguis Christi, inebria me; but as ex- 
pression of religion they have some superiority. 

Schleiermacher found the essence of religion in 
the feeling of dependence. Few entirely agree with 
him, but it is at least religious to feel devoutly our 
dependence on the Ens a se. 

‘Cosmic consciousness,” a kind of experience 
not easily attained by all, in which the barriers 
and outlines of separate things and persons seem 
to fall away, and we seem to see the universe 
whole and in its essential reality (also good, be it 
noted), is a sort of nature-mysticism and a way to 
the religion of God the Ultimate Reality.*° 

The popularizing of mysticism in these days (as 

9 Confessiones, I, 2. 

10Cf, R. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, first published 


1901. It contains a surprising list of well-known persons who 
seem to have had this gift. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 169 


in Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism) most 
explicitly sets forth the mystical union with God 
as “union with Reality.” In that view the modern 
summarizers seem fairly to represent the general 
teaching of more original mystics. ‘The natural 
world of “‘becoming”’ is one level or manifestation 
of Reality, the metaphysical world of “‘being”’ is 
a deeper level of Reality; the most utterly basic is 
the Divine Reality. And this is the point of view 
from which a religious life can be begun which is 
at once ineffably blessed and energetically practi- 
exalt 

Now these miscellaneous instances of the reli- 
gious fruitfulness of the idea of God as the Ulti- 
mate Reality have been given so much place be- 
cause of a certain popular denial that it has any- 
thing to do with religion or life generally. It is 
my firm conviction that prayer which is always as- 
serting what we want—even the highest values—is 
poor in comparison with prayer which sometimes 
waives our value-demands and looks for values to 
appear in what actually exists; that prayer which 
is all petition, even if it is petition that God will 
empower us to serve him well, is inferior to prayer 
which lifts up the mind to God the Ultimate Real- 
ity in acts of faith, hope, and love; that religion 
which does not find a congenial place for some 
exercise of contemplation is less than the highest 


170 GOD AND REALITY 


religion, even if we test it by the work it does; 
for if “voluntary attention is the essential phe- 
nomenon of will,” contemplation of Reality may 
even be the essential act of morality, and the re- 
ligion which has a large element of appreciation 
of Ultimate Reality may be the most practical 
kind of religion. 


IV 


This aspect of the Divine Being makes some 
difference in the way in which we view every one 
of the attributes of God; and there are some attri- 
butes in particular which are thought of mainly 
by way of analysis of the idea of Ultimate Reality. 
Even in these, however, our deductions are not the 
purest logic; on the whole we are trying to say 
only what is involved in the idea of the Ultimate 
Being, but we cannot help our characterizations 
being more or less affected by our experience of 
apparent reality. Let us examine these attributes, 
“metaphysical” as they are so often called—these 
attributes that have had to bear the brunt of mod- 
ern dislike of the metaphysical, that serve as bug- 
bears, needing only to be quoted, in sonorous lists, 
to alienate and disgust men of active good-will. 
They do not always alienate and disgust. Just as 
there are always some who take deep delight in the 
‘‘Consubstantial, co-eternal, while unending ages 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 171 


run’ of the hymnal, so there are some in every 
class in theology who glory in the metaphysical 
attributes. John Henry Newman and William 
James could not see eye to eye in this matter. 

1. God is infinite. The Source of all reality is 
not limited essentially by anything outside his own 
essence. he form of this attribute is negative, 
but if it is taken as here, as an aspect of Ultimate 
Reality, it will be seen to be no mere negation. 
Whatever he is and does is conditioned by what- 
ever else he is and does, because he is the Reality, 
and so he is not unlimited in an absolute sense. 
Infinity is often taken as the primary or “‘tap-root”’ 
idea of God, and indeed by its negative form it is 
fitted to include every other idea—except essential 
external limitation. It is a very wide generaliza- 
tion. But if not strictly defined, if it is left to 
mean unlimitedness in general, it seems to me too 
bare of content altogether to serve as primary idea 
of God (almost as if one should take the termina- 
tion -issimus as the primary idea). And if defined 
strictly as above, it seems rather an aspect of Ulti- 
mate Reality than the primary idea. I take it to 
stand for the ultimateness of the divine Reality. 

2. God is self-existent, the Ens-a-se. This 
‘‘aseity”’ is so close to the idea of Ultimate Real- 
ity that I can see in it only a virtual synonym; and 
if anyone prefers this expression to “Ultimate 


172 GOD AND REALITY 


Reality,” and takes it as the defining or tap-root 
attribute of God (as does Pohle-Preuss) I can 
see no objection. 

3. God is the Absolute, in the sense that Abso- 
lute means Reality without contradiction, independ- 
ent and eternal Fact, on which all other facts or 
seeming facts depend. If it means the all-inclusive 
Universe, including indifferently evil as well as 
good (this is what so many object to in the idea 
as they interpret it), then probably neither meta- 
physicians nor theists would call it God. But both 
“God” and the “Absolute” signify (as we now 
view it) Ultimate Reality, and so far are equiva- 
lent. Again I must quote Hocking: “I do not 
say that the Absolute is equivalent to God; I say 
that God, whatever else he may be, must needs 
also be the Absolute.” ** 

4. God is inscrutable. This is a following-out 
of the idea of ultimateness, and might fairly be 
expressed in the scientific saying that science can 
not ascertain ultimate origins. Even if we could 
have sense-perception of that which is ultimately 
real, we could not tell by sense-perception whether 
it was ultimately real or not. And aside from 
sense-perception, our reason does not ever become 
aware of all truth, and therefore can not exhaust- 
ively comprehend ultimate truth. 


11 Meaning of God in Human Experience, 206. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 173 


5. God is one. This makes explicit the singu- 
lar number of such words as Ultimate Reality, 
Ens-a-se, Absolute, etc. The one and the many— 
that is the problem of philosophy. All reasoning, 
scientific, philosophical, religious, tends to view the 
many as manifold cases of few forces or laws or 
principles. Even polytheism is infinitely more 
monistic than (of course) atomism, or than taking 
each event as an isolated thing. And that monistic 
tendency persists until a monotheism is reached: 
all the many things of life are only many results, 
however indirect, of one Ultimate Principle. Plu- 
ralistic protests ring out from time to time (and 
practically everyone has a certain amount of plu- 
ralism which he will not surrender), but there is 
no denying a tendency to believe in one general 
explanation of all things, and in religion to be- 
lieve in one Ultimate Reality. 

6. God is simplex, or homo-ousios, of one sub- 
stance, all-of-one-kind. All divinity, so to say, is 
alike, is the same, is not complex. Always as we 
go toward the more single explanation of the mani- 
fold, we find it more and more simple as well as 
single. Original substances are simple substances. 
This attribute has been mentioned as a constituent 
of value; it is here noted as an element or aspect 
of Ultimate Reality. 

7. God is spiritual. His simplex substance is 


174 GOD AND REALITY 


spirit. [Chis also has been mentioned in the other 
lists. [he appropriateness of bringing it in here 
is, on the surface, at least questionable; for on the 
surface spirit seems a comparatively unreal thing, 
a flickering, evanescent aura hovering about the 
real stuff, which is‘matter. But spirit is discovered 
not only in a search for ideals, but in the sternest 
search for reality, as philosophically in idealism 
and religiously in mysticism. As so scrutinized, 
the phenomenal world bears upon it the marks of 
its contingency, its merely seeming to be finally 
real; and the real world is something lying behind 
the visible. Of course, not all would agree that 
the most real substance is spirit, so that this attri- 
bute cannot be said to be indubitably and neces- 
sarily involved in the idea of God the Ultimate 
Reality as such. 

8. God is immensus, that is, not subject to the 
limitations of space-measurement. This is an 
aspect of spirituality. 

9. God is eternal, that is, not subject to the 
limitations of time-measurement. Clock-time, as 
Bergson calls it, does not commend itself to most 
reality-seekers as final fact. It may be that terms 
will have to be made with the conviction that 
durée, the deeper reality of which clock-time is the 
superficial appearance, is deep enough and real 
enough to be of the very essence of the universe. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 175 


Certainly “‘eternal’’ is conceived of from the point 
of view of time, as “immense”’ is from the point 
of view of space. But generally those who call 
the Ultimate Reality God attribute to him what 
Von Higel calls simultaneity. 

10. God is omnipotent. This attribute is gen- 
erally used to refer to what God can do, looking, 
as it were, from God’s point of view into the fu- 
ture, and declaring that he has enough power to do 
all that it is in his nature to will, or in the nature 
of power as such to accomplish. But I think that 
what is often mentioned as a secondary meaning 
of the attribute is more important, and more di- 
rectly dependent upon the idea of God as Ultimate 
Reality, namely that all the power that exists is 
God’s power, all the forces in play now or ever 
are God’s forces. ‘This is the more worth empha- 
sizing in view of the propaganda that God does 
not use force, that his omnipotence is to be found 
in the power of love. In Concerning Prayer, the 
well-wrought 12th Essay, on Faith, Prayer, and 
the World’s Order, speaks often in disparagement 
of force. ‘So the love of God is omnipotent, not 
as controlling and shaping the outward course of 
events. Love is omnipotent because it can always 
in any circumstances give a perfect expression of 
itself. It has no need to manipulate history, be- 
cause it is always sufficient to meet any situa- 


176 GOD AND REALITY 


tion.” ? J do not like those negatives. ‘The es- 
say is closely reasoned, and many qualifications 
and compensations are made in it, but I cannot 
escape the impression that the forces of the physi- 
cal world are abandoned as hopelessly Godless, 
out of connection with God’s love and power. 
There seems to be too much contempt for external 
events. If it is not God who uses force, who is it? 
‘The craft and subtlety of the devil or man” use 
some of it sometimes, we all agree. But though 
sinfully misused by creatures, it is God’s force, 
first and last, if God is the Ultimate Reality. The 
well-considered teaching of this essay and others 
like it has been exaggerated by lesser folk into an 
ill-considered dualism, according to which there is 
a realm of love which belongs to God, and a realm 
of natural force which does not belong to God. 
Here again the idea of God as Supreme Value, 
with limitations on the side of Ultimate Reality, 
seems to prevail. 

In regard to all-the analysis of the idea of God 
as Ultimate Reality, we can find as a general atti- 
tude the disposition to discover truth rather than 
to make it; to “‘accept the Universe’’ because there 
it is anyway, and we’d better accept it, as Carlyle 
said; to look at it with a reverent attempt at in- 


12 Pp. 420-1. An able exposition of this idea is also in H. M. 
Relton, Some Postulates of a Christian Philosophy, c. VI. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 177 


sight into its meaning; to love God, when it comes 
to that, as one loves the Truth. And we can alter 
the famous old protest thus: “I will call no being 
God who is not fundamentally real; and I will call 
no being real who is not what I mean when I 
apply that term to one of my fellow-creatures; and 
if it is only an unreal God that offers to save me 
from hell, to hell I will go, and make the best of 
ts 

Professor John Dewey says, in Experience and 
Nature,*® . . . ‘‘a mind that has opened itself to 
experience and that has ripened through its disci- 
pline knows its own littleness and impotencies; it 
knows that its wishes and acknowledgments are 
not final measures of the universe whether in 
knowledge or in conduct, and hence are, in the end, 
transient. But it also knows that its juvenile as- 
sumption of power and achievement is not a dream 
to be wholly forgotten. It implies a unity with 
the universe that is to be preserved. The belief, 
and the effort of thought and struggle which it 
inspires are also the doing of the universe, and 
they in some way, however slight, carry the uni- 
verse forward. ... Fidelity to the nature to 
which we belong, as parts however weak, demands 
that we cherish our desires and ideals till we have 
converted them into intelligence, revised them in 


a3 P4230. 


178 GOD AND REALITY 


terms of the ways and means which nature makes 
possible. When we have used our thought to its 
utmost and have thrown into the moving unbal- 
anced balance of things our puny strength, we 
know that though the universe slay us still we may 
trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in 
existence.’ This book is opposed to almost all of 
the ideas reviewed in the present lectures: it does 
not allow validity to the claim of a Sum of Values 
to perfect existence, or the claim of anything like 
an Absolute; it regards supernaturalism as a mis- 
take; it does not explicitly make a place for God 
or religion at all. I may be misled by the usual 
Christian proclivity for seeing Christianity every- 
where, but at any rate the general trend of the 
passage I have quoted seems to me to suggest an 
attitude to the universe not unlike our religious 
attitude to-God the Ultimate Reality. 

I think most of us have a partiality in favor of 
the truth, and that to most men, rightly, being is 
prior in thought to being good, the Reality of God 
prior to the Value (or other value) of God, what- 
ever is ultimately real is to be taken as God, and 
then his values discovered and appreciated. The 
primary definition of God would best be that which 
is the subject of this lecture—the Ultimate Reality. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 179 


Vv 


This view, however, is not free from objections. 
Though we may take it as the essential starting- 
point for a doctrine of God, the best primary def- 
nition of God, there are ways in which it sometimes 
runs down into something very unsatisfactory. 

It savors somewhat of ‘mere metaphysics.”’ 
‘So much for the metaphysical attributes of God!”’ 
says William James. ‘‘From the point of view 
of practical religion, the metaphysical monster 
which they offer to our worship is an absolutely 
worthless invention of the scholarly mind.” * 
From the time he said this, the case for meta- 
physics has grown steadily more unpopular, until 
quite recently; and even now, in spite of a bit of 
reaction, there are few who are so busy with physi- 
cal things that they have not time for a parentheti- 
cal word now and again in execration of meta- 
physics. For the metaphysical is supposed to be 
the exact antithesis of the practical, and a worth- 
less dissection of definitions and piling up of ab- 
stractions, of no value to effective, happy, moral, 
or religious living, but a sinful waste of energy in 
the manufacture of a product that is not only use- 
less but positively irritating. The way in which 
people go about believing or not believing in God, 


14 Varieties of Religious Experience, 447. 


180 GOD AND REALITY 


with or without any understanding of metaphysics, 
seems to show a certain irrelevance of metaphysics 
to religious belief, to say nothing of religious prac- 
tice. 

It is, I think, the technical elaboration of meta- 
physics, the horrible dialect in which it is discussed 
by its professionals, that exasperates people now 
—not the essence of the thing. A complicated 
technique of description of anything with which 
we are not familiar is irritating. ‘The human mind 
is incurably metaphysical, really: it must have at 
least an inarticulate metaphysics, for it always 
finds that the truth is more than the physical phe- 
nomenon, and the value and meaning of life, if 
anywhere, are beneath the surface of things as ob- 
served. he same kind of objection was not very 
long ago made to medical science as is now made 
to metaphysics: we may grow into a glad faith in 
the latter at least as much as we have in the 
former; there are signs of a greater favor for 
metaphysics right now than twenty-five years ago. 
We cannot do without it in religion, and therefore 
we must have it in theology. But it remains un- 
fortunately true that an elaboration of the meta- 
physical implications of Ultimate Reality seems 
to many people the ultimate unreality. 

It is, again, the strife of systems in metaphysical 
thought that aggravates the damage of technical 


SOD PIES ULTIMATE REALTY < 181 


elaboration. If we call the Ultimate Reality our 
God, what is the Ultimate Reality? Philosophers 
give hundreds of answers. This sort of thing 
ought not to be exaggerated unfairly. One of the 
most glorious works of present-day philosophers 
is a genuine reduction of the difficulty by the dis- 
covery that even the most concrete study of the 
history of philosophy shows a few main differences 
of belief running through the ages. Professor 
Sheldon’s Strife of Systems and Productive Dual- 
ity is noteworthy, though not solitary, in this re- 
spect. Suppose it all reduces itself to one great 
issue, as idealism versus realism, or internal rela- 
tions versus external relations. Even so, a healthy 
mind cannot easily bring itself to believe that the 
great truth of the universe is something so recon- 
dite that it requires a hair’s-breadth nicety of state- 
ment even to say it, a long study of books to make 
sense of it, an almost uncanny testing of gossamer- 
light textures of argument to prefer it to its con- 
trary, and an almost arbitrary push of the mind to 
believe it. “The Ultimate Reality must not be at- 
tainable only by hair-splitting. It must not be an 
attenuated and evanescent thing, like the eyes in 
the picture that seem now open, now shut, or like 
the picture in the psychology books, that looks now 
like a rabbit and now like a duck. 

Further, none of us would be of the number of 


182 GOD AND REALITY 


those ‘‘theologians to whom God’s supreme quality 
is his aloofness and unlikeness to men, who are 
satisfied if he is so far away that even his very 
existence may be dispensed with and neither the 
virtue nor the happiness of man be seriously af- 
fected thereby.’”’?®> The objection is made that to 
define God as the Ultimate Reality, infinite, eter- 
nal, self-existent, etc., is to make him altogether 
aloof from us. Here again I feel that the objec- 
tion is often exaggerated. Just as a matter of 
immedate effect, we can get over being cross if 
we can think of the eternal and infinite, and there 
is the well-worn quotation about seeing life 
‘whole.’ *® But if the thought of God as Ulti- 
mate Reality, analysed into metaphysical attri- 
butes, excludes or eclipses too much the other ideas 
of God, there will be a tendency toward the Epi- 
curean or the Deist theology, and the Ultimate 
will be so ultimate that his reality will easily dis- 
appear, and he will not be the Reality of our lives. 

This way of defining Deity may lead to pan- 
theism. If one refers to the universe frequently 
in religious discourse, one is certain to encounter 
the accusation of pantheism. ‘This is often a mis- 


15 Beckwith, Idea of God, 31. 

16 A young friend of mine, seeing a moving-picture, hit 
upon the truth that the poor get great satisfaction from seeing 
pictures of the rich. 


GOD (oe URTIMAT EH ARRALTDY: 184 


take, for the Ultimate Reality of the universe does 
not necessarily mean the whole universe. If 
this is not the error that leads to the objection, it 
may be that the objector feels so keenly the dif- 
ference between the Maker (often thought of very 
anthropomorphically) and the universe which he 
has made, that the idea of the Maker as the 
Reality of nature seems too nearly to identify God 
and nature. For the most part, in ordinary pres- 
ent-day Christian minds, I think there is more 
danger in a crude anthropomorphic idea of crea- 
tion than in a view which favors an organic union 
between the Creator and the creation; and that 
therefore the defining of God as the Ultimate 
Reality of the universe, which is certainly unfavor- 
able to a petty anthropomorphism, is rather a safe- 
guard than a danger. 

But pantheism is seductive to many minds of 
Jarge perspective, and this definition is not secure 
against that peril. If God is the Ultimate Reality 
of the universe, and if we cannot see that there are 
any different degrees of reality, then every real 
thing is part of God, and his ultimateness, his 
supremacy, consists simply in his wholeness, his 
inclusiveness. Have all things an equally valid 
reality? that is the cardinal question as between 
theism and pantheism, in terms of the present 
definition of God. ‘There are three great differ- 


184 GOD AND REALITY 


ences which theists stubbornly maintain as real 
differences in reality, as against the pantheistic 
leveling-up of all things: the difference between 
causes and effects (or if not causes, something 
analogous to causes), the difference between per- 
sons and things, and the difference between good 
and evil. And if the idea of God as Ultimate 
Reality obscures those differences, after the man- 
ner of pantheism, it is objectionable. 

The difference between cause and effect, or be- 
tween Creator and Creation, Will and Deed, 1s 
represented, though not accentuated, in the dif- 
ference between Ultimate Reality and apparent 
reality, the latter being dependent on the former. 

The difference between persons and things is not 
expressed in the idea that God is the Ultimate 
Reality. It may be a fact, though it cannot be in- 
ductively proved, that, as Bishop Gore says, the 
philosophers without the prophets leave us an im- 
personal God. The philosophers who teach God 
as the Ultimate Reality are probably the ones who 
tend most to leave God impersonal. It is the 
pantheistic tendency to treat persons as no more 
fundamentally real than things, and to make the 
idea of God include both. If then we start by 
defining God as the Ultimate Reality of the uni- 
verse, we have much further to go before we have 
conceived him as the Object of religion. 


GOD THE ULTIMATE REALITY 185 


The difference between good and evil is not 
expressed in this definition, and the way to pan- 
theism is open in this direction also. For probably 
the worst thing that is said about pantheism or 
absolutism is that it is neutral in the moral issue. 
For evil may be just as real as good, just as valid 
or even necessary an element in the experience of 
the Absolute. For the Ultimate Reality to qualify 
as God, we need not simply the noun, but the 
proposition, the dogma, the value-judgment, that 
the Ultimate Reality is good. 

One more adverse criticism often brought 
against taking the Ultimate Reality as the primary 
meaning of God is that it tends to make men ac- 
quiescent and passive instead of active. With this 
religion a man “takes things as he finds them,” 
and is only too likely to leave them as he finds 
them. (This attitude was one of the things for 
which the soldiers in the World War were fre- 
quently praised: was this part of their ‘‘inarticu- 
late religion’ ?) All the force of present-day 
activism, especially here in America, is directed 
against compliance with the universe as itis. The 
Ultimate Reality, however, is not synonymous with 
the universe as it is; the Former may be in com- 
bat with some entities in the latter on some mat- 
ters; but in so far as the Ultimate Reality tends 


9 


to be identified with “things as they are,” super- 


186 GOD AND REALITY 


ficially, the term Ultimate Reality is not a good 
name for God. 

On the whole, nevertheless, I think it is a good 
name for God. ‘That is, the idea which it repre- 
sents, however clumsily, is the idea which could 
least be spared from the complex of ideas which 
is our actual concept of God. Religion depends on 
Reality; value depends on Reality; moral activity 
depends on Reality for its aim and its “take-off.” 
I can think it tolerable to find myself considerably 
mistaken in regard to qualities of God as we now 
believe in them; our belief there could be revised; 
there would be something to go on. But to keep 
my ideas of the qualities of God, his whole con- 
crete picture, intact in my mind, even growing 
more beautiful and imposing, and to find myself 
mistaken in regard to his existence—that seems 
intolerable. And I think nearly all of us would 
rather find ourselves mistaken than be absolutely 
guaranteed against the possibility of mistake by 
the impossibility of truth. It is better that what 
I believe should be (for.the time) wrong because 
there is an objective truth, than that what I believe 
should be right because there is none. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 


WE need only to dip slightly into the stream of 
current literature to be aware that the single word 
“God” has a medley of meanings. We need only 
to know a little history to see that it has been 
so for a long time, with wide variations. If our 
analysis has not been utterly at fault, we can dis- 
cern a few leading ideas of what God means: 
gods are the high spots in the universe, or in our 
experience of it; God is the Principle of Good- 
ness; God is the Source-Reality of all things. 
The analysis would be very much at fault if we 
insisted that these ideas are to be found pure and 
unconfused, for they are always at least a little 
mixed. But in a considerable number of cases it 
is quite easy to see that one or another of them is 
the leading idea or the definition of God. 

In speaking with Christians I have found it dif- 
ficult to get them to see the differences between 
what we have singled out as the Proximate Reality, 
the Supreme Reality, and the Supreme Value. We 

187 


188 GOD AND REALITY 


can resort to dramatization, and suggest the dif- 
ferent attitudes which express the different mean- 
ings: for the Present Reality, ““Here comes God” ; 
for the Supreme Value, ‘“‘Let us strive for God’’; 
for the Ultimate Reality, ‘‘We are in God all the 
time.” But, sharpen the edges as we will, most 
Christians feel that the outlines are artificial. And 
I believe that is simply because there is a Christian 
concept of God, an already achieved synthesis of 
these more elementary ideas, unless it should be 
called a confusion rather than a synthesis. It is 
intended now to examine the ways in which the 
welding together is done. 


I 


It would appear that men have always thought 
of God as a Superior; but earliest as a “This,” 
then as a “Good,” then as the Source-Reality of 
the whole. And I think the earliest combination 
was effected between “This” and ‘‘Good,”’ in some 
such proposition as ‘This is God, being good.” 
‘“This” awesome being might be a devil, but being 
good he is a God. The nature-polytheisms reach 
this position before they die (or rather ‘‘pass 
on’). It is a great thing when Israel makes its 
test of deity less the ability to “answer by fire” 
than the will to answer by love. Aut bonus aut 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 189 


non deus becomes the rule. For our present pur- 
poses we need not even survey the process of mor- 
alizing the idea of God as it went on in Israel and 
in ethnic religions. In Christology the principle 
is so strikingly shown that we may confine our- 
selves to that. 

The fact is that Jesus of Nazareth came to be 
believed in as God. The historical scholarship 
of our own time has gravitated in both directions, 
from the Old Testament and from the early 
Church, to this central interest, namely the origins 
of this belief in the Deity of Christ. Nowadays, 
a development is traced through several stages. 
Jesus appeared first in a ministry somewhat re- 
sembling that of the Prophets, mysteriously 
authoritative in personality, powerful and merci- 
ful in miracles, and graciously compelling in moral 
and religious teaching. Then he was by some 
accepted as the Messiah, the superhuman repre- 
sentative of God, sent by God for the deliverance 
of Israel. After the overthrow of their early faith 
by the crucifixion, the disciples were led by the 
Resurrection to believe his messiahship vindicated, 
and by the experience of Pentecost to believe that 
his glorified life in heaven in union with the Father 
was proved by his power indwelling in themselves 
—in the Church. St. Stephen commends his spirit 
to the Lord Jesus, and St. Paul, Hebrews, and 


190 GOD AND REALITY 


the Fourth Evangelist ascribe to him divine func- 
tions as well as the human functions of a divine 
Person incarnate. 

Now certainly the beginning of the data was the 
human life and character of Jesus. ‘There was 
(to use our terminology) a Proximate Reality, a 
“This” at hand, manifestly superior to the general 
run of mankind in some way; but was he “‘Elias,”’ 
or “‘that prophet,” or “‘the Messiah,” or was he in 
league with Beelzebub the chief of the devils? 
The miracles were not the decisive answer to that, 
as he himself repeatedly declared. Those who 
accepted him as in some sense divine did so be- 
cause, as they lived with him, he came more and 
more to have for them “the values of God.” 
This much-cited saying of Bishop Gore’s must be 
quoted in its context. 

“The report of the divine voice at the baptism, 
the story of the temptation in the wilderness which 
Jesus must at some time have communicated to 
them, the strange cries of the demoniacs “Thou art 
the Son of God—the holy one of God,’ and their 
horror of Him as of some awful power, and also 
certain solemn and hardly intelligible words of 
His own, made them conscious of amystery. There 
were names, ‘Son of Man,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘Christ,’ 
which were in their ears and would have to be 
explained. But while all this process of question- 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 191 


ing was going on, something deeper was happen- 
ing. Beyond all possibility of question, and seem- 
ingly by His own deliberate intention, Jesus, so 
far as they yielded their faith to Him, was taking 
the place of God, or in modern phrase gaining 
‘the values of God,’ for their souls. Not all the 
values of God. They did not, I suppose, at that 
time dream of Him as the creator of the world 
and the ruler of the course of nature. No doubt 
they thought of Him as wholly under God. But 
within the sphere of their personal lives, He had 
been growing to have to them the values of God, 
as the object of their absolute faith, their infallible 
refuge and informer and protector and guide.” ? 

It must be certain that their letting our Lord 
take the place of God for their souls was not at- 
tributing to him the cosmic ultimateness of God, 
‘‘as the creator of the world and the ruler of the 
course of nature.’ Some command over the 
forces of nature was recognized in him, and 
counted toward belief in his divinity; but miracles 
wrought at the word of a man (those who believed 
in Christ’s miracles believed in miracles by Elisha, 
St. Peter, and others) are far from proving him 
the Ultimate Power of the universe. 

Then what part of the idea of God is meant 
when we say that Jesus gained ‘‘the values of 


1 Belief in Christ, 52-3. 


192 GOD AND REALITY 


God” for the disciples? The moral attributes of 
God for the most part, I should say. ‘That 1s, 
in the terms we have been using, Jesus was judged 
to be divine because he had the character of God 
the Supreme Value. What else distinguished him 
from a Barjesuis or a Simon Magus or any other 
wonder-worker? However far the mysteriousness 
of his personality and his mighty works would 
have led them into faith, surely we can see that 
that would have been as nothing compared with 
the belief they did attain. And surely it was his 
moral supremacy that made the difference. He 
was called the Son of God because he was believed 
to be like God in his moral character. 

We of later times have become accustomed to 
beautiful and eloquent appeals for the supremacy 
of our Lord, vivid and sympathetic accounts of 
the dawn and development of the disciples’ faith, 
and almost everything except plain statements of 
just why we should believe that he is God. The 
essence of the argument is veiled in chapters of 
history or homily. When extracted, it appears to 
be mainly a reasoning from the moral supremacy 
of Jesus to his Deity. Other arguments, from 
prophecy, from miracles, from his claims, from 
his success, simply melt away if his moral value is 
not apprehended. The appeal to ‘“‘just try it out” 
—try out the religion which takes Christ as God— 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 193 


‘‘and see if it doesn’t make a satisfactory religion 
for you,” is wholly an appeal to people’s sense of 
values, and depends for success on Christ’s being 
qualified to be not only a Proximate Reality as 
object of religion, but the Supreme Value as moral 
ideal. He is divine because he is “‘mighty to save”’ 
—that means essentially the same thing. If ever 
in human experience the God of perfect goodness 
has appeared, he has appeared in Jesus. If ever 
there has been a high point of human experience 
in which the moral beauty of God has come to a 
focus, that high point is the life and character of 
our Lord. Since his humanity is Jike God in moral 
value, it is humanity actuated by God, the human- 
ity of God. Such, I think, is the main argument. 

The question naturally arises (it does actually 
arise whenever this argument is made clear) 
whether this means that any extraordinarily right- 
eous man ought to be taken as divine in the same 
sense, and that any man who is at all righteous is 
likewise divine, only in a lesser degree. It does 
not. There is, of course, a sense in which every 
extraordinarily righteous man is a proximate real- 
ity having high moral value and therefore being a 
manifestation of God. ‘That is recognized in the 
attitude of hero-worship, and shall we say saint- 
worship? The saints are canonized for their 
miracles and morals, and are in their degree rec- 


194 GOD AND REALITY 


ognized as “partakers of the divine nature.’ But 
when we appreciate our Lord Jesus Christ as per- 
fectly righteous, we must mean Christ as he actu- 
ally was, with all the distinctive characters which 
he does not share with all saints. The Jesus who 
proclaimed himself the Judge of all, the new Law- 
giver, the Lord and Master, the Saviour—that 
is the concrete and distinctive Person who 1s 
judged righteous; in all his moral and religious 
authoritativeness he is judged righteous. Abso- 
lute righteousness is authoritative in that way, we 
believe; it is the only righteousness which can 
rightly be authoritative in that way; God’s right- 
eousness alone is authoritative in that way; and if 
Christ’s righteousness is thus authoritative and 
still commends itself as supreme righteousness, it 
is the divine righteousness. 

The definite, historical, objective This, the 
Proximate Reality, extraordinary, mysterious, 
‘numinous,”’ spiritually powerful—Jesus Christ— 
is of supreme moral value, and is thus identified 
with God who is the Sum of Values. Whether 
he is identical with God considered as the Ulti- 
mate Reality is another question, the explicit an- 
swer to which came later. 

There is thus a synthesis of two of the leading 
ideas of God, the definite Object singled out from 
the environment, and the Consummation of all 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 195 


Values. This judgment is enough to establish the 
claim of a Kyrios of one of the mystery-religions, 
say. And when Christ is taken as Lord and Sa- 
viour, regardless of the universe and his relations 
to it, it is enough to justify such a claim for him. 
God may be finite, but at least he is good: God is 
the good forces in the universe. “Wherever one is 
conscious of values, there one is conscious of God; 
or, where value is there is God.’’?. One is con- 
scious of values in Christ, therefore one is con- 
scious of God in him. Some religions, and many 
religious persons, Christian and non-Christian, go 
practically no further. 


II 


But there is a deep-seated urge to go further. 
The Veiled Being, the Absolute, or the Ultimate 
Reality, commands (though with a still, small 
voice) that we take some attitude toward him. 
There must be some relation between the Proxi- 
mate and the Ultimate Reality. Having so ex- 
tensively cited William James as witness to the 
God who is experienced close at hand in religious 
feeling, I must be permitted to make in fairness 
one last quotation from him, to show how even 
so ardent an advocate of the Proximate-Reality 


2 Beckwith, Idea of God, 199. 


196 GOD AND REALITY 


God felt the need for a synthesis with Ultimate 
Reality. 

“God is the natural appellation, for us Chris- 
tians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call 
this higher part of the universe [1.e., ‘the mystical 
region, or the supernatural region, whichever you 
choose’] by the name of God. We and God have 
business with each other; and in opening ourselves 
to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. 
The universe, at those parts of it which our per- 
sonal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for 
the worse or for the better in proportion as each 
one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands... . 
God is real since he produces real effects. 

“The real effects in question, so far as I have 
as yet admitted them, are exerted on the personal 
centres of energy of the various subjects, but 
the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is 
that they embrace a wider sphere than this. Most 
religious men believe (or ‘know,’ if they be mys- 
tical) that not only they themselves, but the whole 
universe of beings to whom God is present, are 
secure in his parental hands. . . . God’s existence 
is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be 
permanently preserved. This world may indeed, 
as science assures us, some day burn up or freeze; 
but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure 
to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 197 


God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and 
shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely 
final things. Only when this farther step of faith 
concerning God is taken, and remote objective 
consequences are predicted, does religion, as it 
seems to me, get wholly free from the first imme- 
diate subjective experience, and bring a real 
hypothesis into play. ... That the God with 
whom, starting from the hither side of our own 
extra-marginal self, we come at its remoter mar- 
gin into commerce should be the absolute world- 
ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief. 
Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of al- 
most every one’s religion.” 3 

Put into schematic language, the general synthe- 
sis will be something like this: God the infinite 
manifests himself in the finite. There are several 
characteristically Christian ways in which such 
manifestations are believed to be made. 

There is the relation which we call creation, 
using the analogy of human manufacture. From 
this point of view, there are grades of reality, 
some of which are more causative, or originative, 
or self-standing, and others more effected, de- 
rived, dependent. And although it is true that 
what is made is (perhaps infinitely) different from 
its maker, yet it is no less true that what is made 


8 Varieties of Religious Experience, 516-8. 


198 GOD AND REALITY 


is like its maker; it has some of his mind in it; its 
materia is unlike but its forma is like him. So we 
must needs keep our idea of the Ultimate Reality, 
if truly Reality, in tune with Proximate Reality— 
the Infinite-idea in tune with the finite—if we are 
to have a God-concept which combines these ele- 
mental ideas. 

So theologically we have the via affirmationis or 
causationis, the way of ascertaining divine attri- 
butes by observation of nature, learning the nature 
of the ‘‘Cause’’ from the effects, the Worker from 
his works. The Logos-theology of the early 
Church was an attempt at synthesis in this direc- 
tion. It is clear that the idea of the Logos was 
then used to account for creation rather than for 
Incarnation. Instead of being content with two 
terms, the infinite God and the world, in no rela- 
tion but that of creation (which seemed abrupt 
and crude), theologians employed three terms, 
God, the divine Reason, and the world. Perhaps 
we should not be too far from their thought if we 
put it thus: God, God’s idea of a world, the world. 
It reminds us of the more modern cosmogony, 
God, value, existence. But with or without a 
mediating term or Person, the synthesis is in effect 
this: the visible world is the expression of the mind 
of God the Infinite Reality. This leaves the way 
open for the method of analogy, finding God in 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 199 


his works. I hope we need say no more on the 
essential sanity of this. 

Religiously we have the Benedicite omnia opera, 
St. Patrick’s Breastplate, St. Francis’ Canticle of 
the Sun, and the passages cited in Lecture IV for 
a religious attitude toward the Ultimate Reality 
of the universe. Juliana of Norwich says,— 

‘“‘Also in this He showed me a little thing, the 
quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; 
and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon 
with eye of my understanding, and thought: What 
may this be? And it was answered generally thus: 
It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might 
last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen 
to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered 
in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall 
[last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing 
hath the Being by the love of God. In this Little 
Thing I saw three properties. The first is that 
God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the 
third, that God keepeth it.” * 

Wordsworth and Tennyson (most generally 
venerated of household gods of our fathers) 
spoke at length in the language of nature-mysti- 
cism. I shall not quote them at length; one fa- 
miliar bit of Tennyson, however, is so in line with 


4 Revelations of Divine Love, c. V. 


200 GOD AND REALITY 


Juliana of Norwich, and so summarizes this creed, 
that we must allow it a place. 


Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower—but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is. 


If any little thing in nature can be held in mind 
along with the Infinite Creator, as God’s love com- 
ing to a point, so to speak, human persons are 
especially windows into the Infinite, made in the 
image of God and after his likeness. If the Ulti- 
mate Reality of a universe containing persons must 
be like what is real in that universe, he will be at 
least personal in all that is positive and essential 
in personality, and there is an anthropomorphism 
which is trustworthy and valuable for the synthesis 
of proximate and Ultimate Reality. 

This can be worked out in detail with all the 
divine attributes of which we can be aware. They 
are all more or less tinged with our experience of 
near-at-hand reality. We can approximate them 
all; and I think if we could not approximate them 
we should not have any idea of them. We experi. 
ence something of what it is to be infinite, in that 
we know what it is now and then to be relatively 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 201 


free from external constraint and limited only by 
our own nature; we approximate self-existence, 
when we compare our own semblance to inde- 
pendent existence with things which we cause, or 
make, or destroy; immensity and omnipresence, 
when we mentally transcend space in our thoughts 
of other places and our communications with other 
persons; eternity, when we transcend time-limits 
in memory and foresight, or when we think of a 
whole story covering years, in a moment’s flash of 
consciousness, or when we are so interested that 
we forget the passage of time; omnipotence, when 
we experience any power at all; omniscience, when 
we know three or four things at once. And at 
least in some stunted degree we are even more at 
home with the moral attributes than with these 
others. If we have made our idea of God in our 
own image, it is because he is our Ultimate Reality. 

But the high point in man’s direct experience of 
God at hand, in nature, and in human nature, is 
Christ’s human nature. And the synthesis between 
the human life of Jesus and God the Ultimate 
Reality is the Incarnation of the Logos, whereby 
the two natures, the divine and the human, were 
united as the two modes of life of one Person. 
This is not the place to argue at length in defence 
of the maligned ‘“‘two-natures doctrine.’ But it 
has the merit of keeping the two terms, divine and 


202 GOD AND REALITY 
human, pure. ‘The God who is the Value-God 


alone, and the man who has the value of God, 
might well merge, coalesce, mix, in a Monophysite 
Christ. But the nature of God as the Ultimate 
Reality, including his universal functions, is (how- 
ever like) a very different nature from that of 
man with all necessary human limitations. Hu- 
manity is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omni- 
present. It is because the human nature of Christ 
is so uniquely like (éuoovows) the divine nature that 
we believe it is personally united with the divine 
nature which is duoovcws rG Harpé.5 The synthesis 
of God and man in Christ is not to be found in a 
vague identification of God and man, as if the 
perfection of the humanity were the same thing as 
divinity. “Chat would indeed be making God “‘ad- 
jectival.”’ 

The Church’s definition is that the union of 
Godhead and manhood in Christ is hypostatic. 
The Western word for this is personal. Every 
man is united to God in some way, at least by 
creation, so that God knows and in a sense expert- 
ences humanity in every man. But in the Hypo- 
static Union God knows and experiences a human 
life as his very own. Here is a homely analogy, 
to add to the many already suggested by theo- 


5] hope to be excused from making a Greek adjective agree 
grammatically with an English noun. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 203 


logians. A woman makes a gown, and we may 
say that she puts her mind and heart into it. It 
is thus united to her, as her “creation,” though it 
be worn by someone else. But if she makes one 
for her very own wearing, the union is more like a 
hypostatic union, the gown being then part of her 
intimate experience, part of what she thinks of 
when she thinks “I.’’ Or this: A doctor knows 
patients, having dealt largely with them; but one 
day he becomes a patient himself, and the doctor- 
nature and the patient-nature are the diverse ex- 
periences of one person. ‘What we may justly 
say is that from that moment [of the Incarnation] 
there is in God not only a sympathetic understand- 
ing of our state and of death itself, but a real 
experience. He Himself hath suffered, being 
tempted.”* * 

It will help, I am sure, if we remember that 
‘‘person”’ is not wholly, nor mainly, nor necessarily 
at all (I think), a term of division, separation, as 
if it were meant merely to mark off one from an- 
other, but that it is a term of union. It is the 
unity-principle of a rational life. The “person” 
is the symbol of the unity that there is in all a 
man’s stream of consciousness, his varied experi- 
ences, sleeping and waking, remembering and for- 
getting, acting and suffering, borrowing and pay- 


6 Temple, Christ the Truth, 146. 


204 GOD AND REALITY 


ing. We are all perfectly familiar with diverse 
experiences of one person, only they are not so 
very diverse in us. ‘he doctrine of the Hypo- 
static Union raises this relation to the infinite, and 
says it is God’s way—the diverse experiences be- 
ing very diverse, the divine and the human in all 
their contrast, and the principle of union being 
Something analogous to the most effective kind of 
unity we know, that is, a Person. 

There is so much that needs to be said about the 
theology of the Incarnation, even to safeguard the 
very little one does say, that it may seem reckless 
to go thus far and leave it so; but the main point 
is that the doctrine of the Incarnation is a synthesis 
between the Proximate-Reality idea of God and 
the Ultimate-Reality idea of God, without reduc- 
tion of either term, and with a principle of union 
which at least has meaning as a rational principle 
of union. 

Religiously, the Incarnation is the power of 
Christianity. All through the poisonous bitterness 
of the Christological controversies, and in spite of 
it, the religious interest was felt to be the thing 
at stake. We are saved by the union of God and 
man in Christ; Very God, as the Nicene Creed 
says, died on the cross for our salvation. And 
there has been a tremendous religious appeal in 
just the contemplation of the Infinite God united 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 205 


to our insignificant humanity. Religious poetry 
has loved to sing of the awful contrasts which the 
Incarnation brings together. 


Quando venit ergo sacri plenitudo temporis, 
Missus est ab arce Patris natus orbis conditor, 
Atque ventre virginali caro factus prodiit. 
Vagit infans inter arcta conditus praesepia, 
Membra pannis involuta virgo mater alligat, 
Et pedes manusque crura stricta cingit fascia." 


That theme never grows stale—the Creator of 
the universe in a little cradle, the Alpha and 
Omega a little Baby, the Ultimate Self-existent 
One helpless among men. 


His are the thousand sparkling rills 
That from a thousand fountains burst 
And fill with music all the hills; 

And yet He saith, “‘I thirst.” ® 


Then, lest the God-with-us, Christ, now 
ascended and glorified, lose some of the character 
of Proximate Reality, the Holy Spirit’s economy 
is to keep the Incarnation close to us, to bring the 
Incarnation home to us. God-in-us is a funda- 
mental religious need, answered somewhat in the 
creation-synthesis with its doctrine of divine im- 


7 Fortunatus, Pange lingua. 
8C, F. Alexander, in The New Hymnal, 156. 


206 GOD AND REALITY 


manence and the mysticism which lives on it. But 
this economy of God-in-us is specialized as an ex- 
tension of the Incarnation when it takes the form 
of the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of Christ, or the 
Spirit of God, dwelling within and sanctifying the 
members of Christ’s Body, the Church. 

A friend has asked me if I mean to find the 
Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity in the three 
ideas of God here set forth. I had not until he 
suggested it; but it is tempting. “The economy 
of the Father is that of God above us, and that 
perhaps comes near being the Ultimate Reality. 
The economy of the Son is that of God with us, 
and that certainly suggests the Proximate Reality. 
The economy of the Holy Spirit is that of God in 
us, and perhaps if we think of inspiration, inward 
power, love, joy, peace, and other “‘fruits of the 
Spirit,” there is something of the idea of the Sum 
of all Values. The great unity-doctrines, Oneness 
of Essence, Perichoresis of the divine Persons, and 
Monarchy of the Father, hold us to the synthesis. 

Still in extension of the Incarnation, the Chris- 
tian religion has the Sacraments, the general prin- 
ciple of which is to make the Ultimate Reality also 
proximate by “outward and visible signs.” ‘The 
instant the general principle is called to our minds ® 


9 As by Dr. Morgan Dix, The Sacramental System, and Fr. 
Paul B. Bull, The Sacramental Principle. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 207 


we can see that the whole universe is organized 
on that principle, if there is a synthesis of its dis- 
crepancies at all; that nature, man, words, money, 
etc., etc., are all applications of the “sacramental 
principle.’ And it also readily appears that the 
Eucharist is the most sacramental of all the Sacra- 
ments, if it is a means not only of grace, but of a 
Presence and grace. In earlier ages (and still in 
the East) that special Presence is thought of 
rather as a coming info us; but it allows us (shall 
we say naturally tempts us?) to look also for a 
special Presence with us. ‘There is something . 
about the religion of God-with-us that is not satis- 
fied entirely by the religion of God-in-us. 

In the full doctrine of sacramental efficacy by 
divine institution, and especially in the doctrine of 
the Real Presence, a complete synthesis is intended 
between the immediately, physically present and 
the Ultimate Reality. ‘The union, if true, goes all 
the way from the Infinite to the bread and wine, and 
the devotion is meant to go all the way from the 
bread and wine to the Infinite. If it does not, as 
perhaps in some popular “‘colloquies” between the 
worshipper and Jesus in the tabernacle, it is seri- 
ously defective. Eucharistic adoration is ultimately 
adoration of God. The Tridentine definition of 
the Real Presence, corpus et sanguinem una cum 
anima et divinitate Domini nostri, indicates that. 


208 | GOD AND REALITY 


The great sacramental union is expressed in such 
a hymn as this: 


Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trem- 
bling stand; 
Ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his 


hand, 

Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to 
demand. 

King of Kings, yet born of Mary, as of old on earth he 
stood, 


Lord of lords, in human vesture—in the Body and the 
Blood 

He will give to all the faithful his own Self for heavenly 
Food.?° 





Every sanctuary, however broad a meaning we 
may give the term, is a meeting-place or synthesis 
between the Proximate and the Ultimate. Sanc- 
tuary-religion may degenerate into a mere cult of 
the immediate. It may also degenerate into mere 
subjectivism, which is a low form of worship of 
the Value-God, the God-that-I-like. But in its 
genuine form it is religion suited to the way in 
which the universe appears to be constituted, and 
so 1s a mark of universal religion. 

In most cities there are a great many streets 
that are simply streets to live on or do business on; 


10 Liturgy of St. James, as translated in The New Hymnal, 
339- 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 209 


but here and there is a street that goes straight to 
the heart of things, and as you come upon it you 
get the city’s great central building, the Capitol, 
clear before your eyes, present to you, though far 
off. ‘These ways of getting a direct, close-home 
experience of God the very Heart of Things— 
finding God in the creature, in the Incarnate, in 
the Sacrament, in the sanctuary—are something 
like that.** 


Ili 


There is one more synthesis of which to take 
some account, the most tremendous combination 
of claims that our mind can conceive—the synthe- 
sis between the Ultimate Reality and the Perfect 
Value. Christian belief in God is not simply tak- 
ing the First Principle of the universe as our su- 
preme concern, regardless of what sort of being 
that is. Nor is it simply taking the Supreme Ideal 
or Value as our great concern, regardless of its 
standing in the universe at large. Christian belief 
in God is not simply acceptance of a noun, still 
less of a mere adjective: it is a proposition, that 
the Ultimate Reality of the Universe is perfectly 
good. 

11 A star, as it is in its own nature, a gigantic thing, stands in 


some such relation to that same star as it twinkles in our pres- 
ence, 


210 GOD AND REALITY 


Some would put it otherwise: a supremely good 
Being exists. That of course does not mean the 
same thing, and in one sense it says too much; in 
another sense, too little. If it means (as it is 
often apt to mean) that we first spin out from our 
own hearts our*ideal of a good God, then it is 
probably too much to claim that he exists. And 
claiming that even the Absolute Perfection of 
Value merely exists is too little. Christian theism 
follows the monistic urge to the point of staking 
its life on the identity of the Ultimate Reality of 
the universe and the Perfect Value. 

But it seems certain that on the surface of things 
value has a precarious hold on existence. ‘The 
realm of phenomena, of causation, does not reveal 
itself as answering to even moderate demands for 
goodness. It is not that nature is so bad, but that 
it is so colossally indifferent. If it is ordained on 
a principle of value, that fact lies under the sur- 
face. It is not the obvious reality that is per- 
fectly good: it must be at least some ulterior real- 
ity that is so, if anything is. 

Under the surface, then, if anywhere, are the 
perfect Reality and the perfect Value. And, in 
theistic philosophy generally, under the surface 
these two agree in one, distinguishable in thought 
but inseparable in essence. We need only mention 
again Plato’s Idea of the Good, St. Thomas’ 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 211 


Omne ens, inquantum ens, est bonum, and Bonum 
et ens idem sunt secundum rem, distincta tamen ab 
invicem secundum rationem, and as bringing this 
tradition down to date, Bishop Temple’s “The 
ultimate Reality and the primary ground of exist- 
ence for all else is the Creative God, in whom all 
value is eternally real.’ ?* There is a dispute as to 
precedence, but the equation of ens and bonum is 
maintained. 

This is the fundamental affirmative judgment 
which Christians make upon the universe. So far 
as I can understand, it involves an insight into 
present experience, and could not be made unless 
there were some present surface-justification for 
it. It would be unprofitable to make a synthesis 
of Ultimate Reality and Value only by breaking 
up the synthesis between proximate and Ultimate 
Reality: that would be too much like remarriage 
after divorce. Our judgment that the universe at 
heart is all right should have some support from 
the actions of the universe as we see it now. 

Many sanguine souls have no difficulty in the 
matter. They do not see how anybody could look 
at the trees, lakes, flowers, etc., etc., and doubt 
that they are the work of love. But there are 
those who feel, sometimes at least, that the ulti- 


12 Summa, I, v, 1, 3. 
13 Christ the Truth, 16. 


one GOD AND REALITY 


mate reality of this universe must be a devil, or 
an utterly neutral, blind force. 

A favorable judgment of value is passed upon 
the universe when it is seen as a process from 
zero toward perfection. On the surface it is a 
process, in which so many things are striving to- 
ward their maturity of self-realization, and so 
many things are also serving as materia for a 
higher forma, a greater self-realization, that it is 
possible to believe that the whole creation is groan- 
ing and travailing toward a whole self-realization. 
Then the consummated state will have value, and 
the whole process will have value, and every detail 
in the process will have value. And if time is 
only a superficial phenomenal thing, the eternal 
Formula for the curve of the process eternally 
realizes all value. 

This way of viewing the matter has been fa- 
miliar enough, from Aristotle to the Hegelians. 
St. Augustine’s thought that God created things 
containing potentialities was used extensively in 
mediaeval theology. It is a kind of evolutionism, 
a confident recourse to the idea of becoming (to 
reconcile not-being with being), which in modern 
times was greatly refreshed by the coming of sci- 
entific evolutionism. The Value-God is becoming 
more and more actually real; or the Reality of 
the universe is becoming more and more valuable. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 213 


It may for the present seem as if our ideals were 
destined to die on a cross; but give them time, and 
they arise again from the dead and ascend into 
heaven. ‘Time is a great reconciler of the imper- 
fect with the perfect. Yet “‘clock-time’’ does not 
befit Ultimate Reality: by some relation, not tem- 
poral but perhaps analogous to time, the reconcili- 
ation is already made. “Providence,” “the hand 
of God in history,” and such like, are religious 
expressions of this point of view—surely preva- 
lent enough at least to deserve notice as one of 
the great regular ways of holding together a be- 
lief in God the Supreme Reality and the Supreme 
Value. 

Much of modern thinking, both professed phi- 
losophy and the less systematic suggestions of re- 
flective minds, goes wholly against this doctrine of 
improvement. ‘he universe is not improving; it 
is running down, cooling off, finding an equilibrium. 
The cards are marked, the dice are loaded, so 
that we must lose; but we play the game as if we 
were sure to win, and we must keep on doing so. 
Our destiny is failure; but we can be radiantly 
happy over little successes, as so much clear gain. 
We may put on the breast-plate of pessimism, 
wherewith to quench the fiery darts of disappoint- 
ment. Obviously, here is no synthesis of anything 
at all: such a pluralism is certainly inimical to be- 


214 GOD AND REALITY 


lief in God, unless God be defined as a sardonic 
demiurge, or a righteous rebel against the total 
scheme of things, and a good loser. 

The universe has its favorable and its unfavor- 
able aspects. We may take the unfavorable as the 
more real and stable features of it. Or we may 
find ourselves persistently forgetting the unfavor- 
able and remembering the favorable, and we may 
conclude that our tendency to forget the evil is a 
true correspondence of our minds with reality, and 
that the evil is really and rightly forgettable, be- 
cause it is not of the true nature of things. We 
may then judge the universe by its “high spots” 
of value. We differ temperamentally in the ex- 
tent to which we do this. But most of us are im- 
pelled to say of some glorious deed or some mani- 
festation of love in our experience, “Well, a uni- 
verse that produces that is good.’ Christians 
(though but formally) judge the universe by 
Christ as its supreme interpretative fact. A uni- 
verse that can produce Christ must be a universe 
produced by Christ. 

Or again, we may see the realm of causes and 
the realm of values in all their contrast, and feel 
acutely that the system of mechanical causation is 
not, point by point, a system of value-causation or 


14 Someone might be found who would need the explanation, 


that the humanity of Christ is what is meant in the first clause, 
the divinity of Christ in the second. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 215 


purpose. We cannot throw over either system as 
unreal: they both have a strongly convincing ob- 
jectivity. If it is possible, we shall have a belief 
that takes account of both of them, that the Source 
of All is Source and Ground of both the mechani- 
cal system and the value-system. It is possible so 
to believe, if we can see in mechanism a value of 
its own—something in the nature of uniformity, 
dependableness—not a perfected moral order, but 
the only thinkable material for the working-out of 
a moral order. A perfect moral order cannot be 
ready-made; to cause morality mechanically, as 
One causes motion, is self-contradictory; for moral- 
ity is nothing if not free activity. 

Then, with a little change in point of view, we 
may find that the universe is good just by treating 
it as good, acting on the assumption that it is good. 
In regard to many details we do this, not waiting 
to let them show us first whether they are good or 
not, but taking an initiative in treating them as 
well-meaning or well-meant; and very often we 
find, even to our surprise, that the assumed value 
justifies itself. This is a recognized way of deal- 
ing with other persons, and (as Professor Hock- 
ing says) it may work well in dealing with God. 

‘For the proof of this new-found or new-made 
relation to reality, expressed in my God-idea, is 
this: that in meeting my world divinely it shows 


216 GOD AND REALITY 


itself divine. It supports my postulate. And with- 
out such act of will, no discovery of divinity could 
take place. Men cannot be worthy of reverence, 
until I meet them with reverence: for my reverence 
is the dome under which alone their possible great- 
ness can stand and live. Of the world likewise,— 
it can have no divinity but only materiality or 
menacing insensibility, unless I throw over it the 
category under whose dome its holiness can rise 
visible and actual. God cannot live, as divine and 
beneficent, except in the opportunity created by 
our good-will: but given the good-will, reality is 
such as will become indeed divine. . . . He who 
waits his assent till God is proved to him, will 
never find Him. But he who seeks finds—has al- 
ready found.” * 

Surely the verification of goodness is different 
from the verification of fact. And a synthesis or 
equation in which one member is Value is subject 
to the peculiarities of value-judgment. This one 
has, for Christians, moral certainty. And that is, 
I think, all that can be, or need be, said for it. 


IV 


The God of the heart, the God of the sanctuary, 
the God of the universe—is it all one God? 


18 Meaning of God in Human Experience, 146-7. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 217 


It is not the easiest thing in the world to hold 
fast this unity. Nothing less can be satisfac- 
tory. But surely it is good to know that though 
a man cannot see his way to the fullfledged 
belief in God, everyone can believe in God 
in one or other of these great age-long meanings, 
and have a religion with such belief. He can have 
religious dealings with a Voice near by, a Satpoy 
in Socrates’ sense, a mysterious and holy Presence 
that comes now and then; or he can worship the 
Ideal and serve it morally and religiously; or he 
can venerate and love the Truth, the Final Fact 
of all things. If he holds firmly to but one of 
these simpler God-ideas, he is likely to be reaching 
out after the others, and his heart is restless until 
it rests in the full-orbed harmony of the one God, 
who is above us and with us and in us. 

We count not ourselves to have apprehended 
fully what this means. If we believe that there 
has been a progressive interaction of revelation of 
himself by God and discovery of God by man in 
the past, we cannot doubt that Christian knowl- 
edge of God has yet to attain much of depth and 
reach: if our definitions have been correct, correct 
enough to serve as true lines toward the truth, we 
may discover indefinitely more of Reality, and 
may become indefinitely more sensitized to Value. 
Our best hope in this direction, I believe, lies not 


218 GOD AND REALITY 


in either of these apprehendings separately, but in 
their combination—we shall know God better if 
we learn better to appreciate the Value of Reality. 
And we must not neglect the further, complemen- 
tary, prospect, of learning better to be instru- 
mental, through knowledge and love and will, in 
making and securing reality for value, in the time- 
process itself. 

But when it comes to the final power of any one 
human mind to hold such a stupendous conviction 
as that the Source of all existence is an eternally 
perfect Being, it appears evident that anything like 
a perfect balance of the terms of this proposition 
in an individual’s thinking is too much to expect 
as yet. Of even the most perfectly theistic minds, 
some will find their religious centre of gravity in 
the Reality side of the equation, and others will 
find it in the Value side. The former, however, 
while they take their stand relentlessly on Reality, 
will see that the absolutely real has some consid- 
erable value, and that the more they know of real- 
ity, and especially the more they know how to treat 
reality and act with it and live with it, the more 
value it manifests. The other sect of our religion, 
relentless in keeping the Ideal absolutely perfect, 
will see that the faultless ideal has some consider- 
able reality, and that the more they know of ideal- 
ity, value, and especially the more they know how 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD 219 


to treat ideality and act with it and live with it, 
the more reality it manifests. And though looking 
in opposite directions, both may be able to find 
that fulfilment of both aspects, the God who is 
the uttermost Real and the uttermost Ideal. 

It is our inveterate love of harmony that does 
the work. It is harmony, that mysterious relation 
between the One and the Many, that furnishes the 
test for reality and for value. ‘The harmonious is 
true, and the harmonious is good. Discord is 
false, and discord is evil. And the ultimate har- 
mony is that between the true and the good, be- 
tween Reality and Value, the expression of which 
is the holy Name of God. 

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus saba- 
oth. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna 
in excelsis. 


i : 
res thal? JG oie | 
Rm MA Biol | 
4 a 
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AO uae ; y 
‘he : 
\ i 
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> 
t ‘wa he 
= i] 





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whist yo i : 
; j f Seba to wi iy 





Fyody 


| uF he h 








a of Se sy 








i NHN 


